A Black Lab named Lady has gone to a lot of trouble to find herself a home. She has been through several at this point: Her original owners died several years ago, and she was adopted by another family. However, when that family adopted smaller dogs, Lady couldn’t get along with them, and her owners took her back to the shelter.
Regardless of their feelings, Lady still thought of them as home; when a woman from Independence, Kansas, adopted her, Lady walked 30 miles to get back to her previous family. But they were very clear: They didn’t want her. It was back to the Chautauqua County Animal Shelter for Lady.
Lady is getting on in years, and she might have lingered at the shelter for the rest of her life, as many older dogs do. However, Helen Rich, the great-granddaughter of William J. Wrigley (yes, the chewing-gum guy) heard about Lady and found the dog a home: her own.
We’ve written about Rich before. She’s a passionate dog lover, known for using the Wrigley fortune to back up that passion. Last October, she helped a Marine’s family members by flying their dogs across the country in her personal plane. The family was moving, and the airlines had told them that the dogs were just too big for commercial planes. (When that story happened, her last name was Rosburg; it changed to Rich after a recent divorce.) She has also founded her own rescue organization: On the Wings of Angels.
The story of Lady’s search for a home resonated personally with Rich; her own Black Lab, Granny, had just died. She told her staff to go to Sedan, Kansas, and bring Lady to her own home, in Odessa, Florida.
Lady arrived at about 10 p.m. last Thursday. It’s been a very long trip, but she has a home now. She’ll have company, too: Within Rich’s 11,000-square-foot home, there already reside five dogs and several cats. We hope this is the end of her travels; if nothing else, it seems certain that she’ll never wind up alone in the Chautauqua County Animal Shelter again, the one place that she kept returning to against her will. Our best wishes to Lady and Helen Rich.
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