THE BIG SATURDAY READ:
MAGGIE the dog had grown used to being target practice.
Vets think she was shot more than 70 times throughout her life – she is also blind and missing an ear.
But the mongrel destined for a short, grim life was rescued from the streets of Beirut, Lebanon, and rehomed in the UK in 2018.
Now, she lives with her new owner, Kasey Carlin, and is doing so well she helps others as a therapy dog.
In an exclusive extract from Kasey’s book, this is the story of how Maggie’s incredible spirit never faltered.
It’s a scorching day in Beirut and a scruffy blonde dog is lying with her head hanging low, chained to a wire crate. Her stomach is bloated due to the puppies she’s expecting and she can’t move to forage for food.
She relies on the man she can hear walking about to ensure she doesn’t starve. To make matters worse, she has no idea where she is.
Her eyes, once a beautiful autumnal shade of orangey brown, are now completely closed, glued together by the infection that has ravaged them.
At some point, her jaw was broken and her left ear has been savagely removed, leaving a misshapen patch of fur-covered cartilage.
If you stroked her, you would feel some of the tiny bullets that are still lodged inside of her.
In Lebanon, it’s normal to see a dog in a bad state. But Maggie was provided a lifeline by a man called Hussein, who runs a dog shelter in the countryside outside Beirut.
He got a call from a friend, saying he’d found a dog who had been severely mistreated and was in desperate need of help.
She was horrifically injured, starving and pregnant. Hussein didn’t think twice. He went out to pick her up immediately and took her back to his shelter.
He couldn’t be sure what had happened to her, but feeling her rough fur riddled with tiny lumps and bumps, the most likely situation, then, was that this poor creature had been attacked at random and shot at by strangers.
She was terrified and skittish on the way back to Hussein’s shelter, and was agitated by being around people, because of the intense trauma she had suffered.
Hussein put a chain on her to stop her running away and was determined to keep hold of her until she got the help she needed and a new home.
But already he was faced with a terrible decision. He knew that when the dog gave birth, no one would want to take on the puppies.
So he made the kindest decision he could – to terminate the pregnancy. Those poor little pups would have had no hope. When her pregnancy was terminated, she was also neutered for her own safety and wellbeing.
The poor creature’s eyes were still open when she arrived at the rescue centre, but they were essentially just cavities. So Hussein took her to the vet, where she was given antibiotics to clear up the infection that had ravaged her eye sockets.
He knew that her eyes would have to be closed permanently at a later date. But Hussein also knew the cost of ongoing surgery was going to pose a serious problem for him.
As dedicated as he was to his animals and his work, Hussein simply didn’t have the funds to carry on paying for vet bills. So he posted on several Facebook rescue groups to see if there was anyone better placed to help this creature.
His efforts paid off.
Maggie arrived in the UK in September, 2018, after a kind woman called Roxanna, who already has a rescue dog from Lebanon, raised enough money to bring her here.
Roxanna couldn’t adopt Maggie herself, but, with the help of animal welfare group Wild at Heart Foundation, they brought us together.
When I saw a picture of Maggie posted on the foundation’s Facebook page, my life changed for ever. And when it was finally time to bring her home, she was the total opposite of what I’d expected.
Bearing in mind her past, she was an astonishingly loving and trusting creature. All she wanted was affection. And the second I took her into my arms and cuddled her for the first time, I was in bits.
I couldn’t stop crying about how beautiful she was. She had this incredible warmth that seemed to radiate and swallow up everyone around her.
To me, she was perfection. As soon as I met her, it was like she was saying to me, “here I am. You’re going to love me”. I didn’t need any convincing. This was one of the most beautiful moments I had ever felt with an animal.
I couldn’t believe how well this poor, beaten, abused dog was taking everything in her stride. She had suffered so much for so long, but now she seemed just to accept her reality and go with whatever was happening.
There were moments where she could suddenly behave so much like a normal dog – like the first time I threw a ball for her.
At that moment, it truly struck me how, despite her blindness, despite her missing ear and her wonky jaw, Maggie really was just a normal dog.
She must have played like that in the past, prior to her injuries, and it was all still there within her.
I couldn’t help noticing more and more when I stroked her, I could feel tiny lumps and bumps that had probably been hidden by rolls of fat before.
There were three more occasions where I found little red dents in her skin. I still couldn’t get my head around what was going on. The marks always seemed to appear on the skinny bits of her – her front legs, her side, the side of her face and her neck.
I knew she still had occasional pain, especially around her front legs, and I began to wonder whether the marks were something to do with the injuries she had suffered in the past.
A few days after the marks appeared, little round pellets would appear on the floor next to her, as if out of nowhere.
I wondered if those little pellets could be ticks of some sort, as I was constantly checking her for them. But a darker possibility also crossed my mind – could they be the remnants of bullets, still lodged in her body from her traumatic experience in Lebanon?
From the day I took her in, Maggie