A Duck Hatched At A School Now Lives With A Golden Retriever And Brought Her Back To Life
Louie the duck hatched at a Long Island elementary school and needed a home. Tori and Justin Cannarelli, who own a garden center in Brookhaven, New York, volunteered to take him temporarily, figuring he might bring some extra life to the family business. He ended up staying. At home, the duck met the family's seven-year-old golden retriever, Barley, and the two connected immediately in a way that nobody had planned for or predicted. The timing mattered, because Barley was in a difficult chapter. About two years before Louie arrived, she began having seizures, was diagnosed with epilepsy, and was placed on medication that successfully stopped the episodes but came with side effects that stripped her of the golden retriever personality her family had always known. She lost her energy, her playfulness, and what Tori described to the Washington Post as her goldenness, her fun, her spunk. She was always sleeping or mopey. The family was quietly accepting that this was simply who Barley was going to be for the rest of her life.
Then Louie waddled in. Barley began visiting the duck's pen every morning, a clear enclosed space with a small pool. The two started wrestling and occasionally stealing bites of each other's food. An unlikely routine became a genuine friendship, and the change in Barley was immediate and total. She started smiling again, Tori told CBS journalist Steve Hartman. She started wagging her tail. She started having personality again. Tori jokes that Louie is Barley's emotional support duck, a description that is accurate in every meaningful sense: whatever was missing in Barley after her diagnosis, the duck managed to give back. The two are now inseparable, their daily interactions documented by the Cannarellis on an Instagram account called @duckandadog, where their videos and photos have found a large and devoted following of people who needed exactly this kind of story at exactly the right moment. Louie, for the record, shows no signs of being aware that he rescued anyone. He is a duck living his best life in a home with a pool, a clear enclosure, and a golden retriever who shows up every morning to see him. He seems fine with the arrangement.
