Maggie is proof that anything is possible
Shot more than 70 times and rescued from the Lebanon, this brave dog’s tale of courage is told in a new book
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 re-homed 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.
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.
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.
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 had a rescue dog from Lebanon, raised enough money to bring her here.
Roxanna couldn’t adopt Maggie, but, with the help of animal welfare group Wild at Heart Foundation, they brought us together.
When I saw a picture of Maggie on the foundation’s Facebook page, my life changed for ever. And when it was time to bring her home, she was the opposite of what I’d expected.
Bearing in mind her past, she was an astonishingly loving and trusting creature.
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.
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.
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.
Her blindness, missing ear, jaw and legs still caused her occasional discomfort, and eventually the day came when I had to take her to the vet to sort her teeth out and have the two broken ones removed..
“You were right about these lumps under Maggie’s skin,” the vet said afterwards. “They’re bullets from where she was shot. Those pellets you keep finding on the floor are fragments of bullet that are working their way out of her body.”
I was shocked, though it shouldn’t really have been a surprise.
“When I got her,” I said tentatively, “Maggie’s rescuers said they thought she’d been shot 17 times. But I’ve already seen five pellets come out of her. Did you find more pellets in her or are there fewer than we thought?”
The vet shook his head. “More. Many more.”
“How many? 20?”
“Kasey, there’s no way of saying this kindly, but there are so many fragments of bullets and shrapnel in Maggie’s body that it’s physically impossible to count them all.”
I stared at the vet in dumbfounded silence, and he turned to pick up the X-rays. When he showed me the scans, I couldn’t even speak. I had no words. The bullets were everywhere.
Literally, her whole head and body were littered with them. I counted the specks of metal in her shoulder area and there were 74 there alone.
The only way we would have been truly able to assess it was by having a CT scan, but that would have cost a lot of money and it didn’t seem worth it. I didn’t want to put her through any more trauma than was absolutely necessary.
The pellets lodged deeper within Maggie were bigger, so the vet’s conclusions were Maggie had been shot three of four times at close range with a shotgun, and then with a BB gun from further away. I already knew that Maggie had survived some horrendous experiences, but it was all too much to take in.
They were still the same shape they were when they left the gun and entered her.
The kindest thing to do for Maggie was to leave the pellets in for now.
There were so many that it would be unbearably painful to go in and try to remove them all.
I kept a close eye on Maggie in the weeks after her op and my discovery of just how badly she had been injured in Lebanon.
Once she had started to settle, I decided to start an Instagram account for Maggie and her socialmedia fame really took off.
Her followers started shooting up and all of a sudden I had a minor celebrity on my hands! Soon we were on This Morning and The One Show, telling the world Maggie’s story. It’s crazy to think that when I first fostered her, some people thought Maggie was so damaged she should have been put down. Just look at her now. She is proof that anything is possible.