Hello! My tail is wagging just thinking about meeting you! I’m Lottie, and I’m a golden retriever! You might be thinking, how can a golden retriever possibly hold a pen, or type? Well, don’t be scared or sad when I tell you this, but the truth is, I’m writing this from Doggy Heaven. You don’t need to be sad, because I had a good life, but more importantly, if I wasn’t here, I wouldn’t be able to tell you my story, would I...

My new owners were called Betty and Joe. They were much older than Jack and Lizzie and there were no children to play with, but they had a bigger house, and, in this place, I wasn’t kept in the yard. I could go anywhere, pretty much, except I soon learned to get off the sofa if I heard them coming home. I spent the first weeks at my new home learning all the fun places to roll around, where the warm pipes under the carpet...

At first, it seemed like a normal day. The sun was shining, and the sky was blue. I waited patiently for Betty to get up and take me out to pee. We trotted along quite normally. I met my friends, the brown dog who always had a ball in her mouth and the golden dog who I think had a crush on me, but was too shy to make his move, at least when our owners were around. But when we got home, Joe had the weird box with the funny...

I remember dreaming that I was running around a horrible, burned landscape. I was trying to find people alive, like I was supposed to. But there were no people at all and, when I came back to my owner, she sent me away angrily. “Go away, useless mutt,” Betty said in the dream, “Who would want such a stupid dog in their home?” I dreamed I walked alone in the desert, useless, abandoned and unwanted. I just wanted to find a...