Muffin was a rescue dog, an ordinary mongrel who joined the Bardsley family in Leeds in 1999. She was three years old and had been badly neglected, undernourished and contained in a high-rise flat for whole of her young life. The family she came into was also under pressure, as the writer's husband Tim was in the middle of a long struggle with cancer and had been told that his illness was terminal. Never having previously shown interest in animals,...