A sad goodbye to Lady

I mentioned on the general chat thread earlier that, sadly, we had to say a final goodbye to our lovely old girl Lady yesterday. I guess this is the right place for a few more thoughts.

She came to us from Northern Ireland in November 2015, having spent the first 5 years of her life in kennelling - not exactly mistreated, but very much used for showing and breeding. It was a very stormy bonfire weekend; she'd had a rough ferry crossing and 2 car journeys down to Burford where we went to pick her up on a day of torrential rain. And she really didn't want anything to do with us when we took her for a first walk off lead in the paddock there. That was until we opened the tailgate of the car whereupon she leapt straight in and curled up - dry and warm at last!

When we got her home we had to introduce her to our old boy Harry and boy, did she love him - but she was always going to be top dog and he certainly knew his place in the pecking order. I think it was a bit strange to her to be living indoors, she had areas where she was quite happy to be on her own but gradually got more confident about being with us (though she was the only dog we've had who never made any effort to come upstairs when I was working in the study - we never did work that one out!)

She qualified as a Pets as Therapy dog and it was one of the weekly highlights at the local primary school when Mrs M took her in to be read to by various children.

We thought we'd lost her 16 months ago when she suddenly collapsed at the end of a long walk - we thought she'd had a stroke and prepared for the worst, but the vet diagnosed something called vestibular syndrome which affects their balance and said she should recover which, in time she did, though she was never as active again as she had been.

She struggled badly over the past couple of weeks and we just had to make the heartbreaking decision to let her go to save her from any more stress. We've been in the same position many times before, but it never gets any easier to actually make the phone call to the vets.The vet who came to our home was actually a former student of mine and was very kind in dealing with the situation.

We shall miss her terribly of course, but doubtless Ralph will help us come to terms with things over the next few weeks.

This is the last picture we took of her and Ralph together up in Derbyshire for the Setter Walk just three weeks ago ..... and a rather less flattering one of her in "comfort mode" in the caravan!