Doting couple install a £1,500 STAIRLIFT so their dachshunds don’t have to climb the stairs
Owners Sheila and Harry Lee of Ossett, West Yorks say money well spent. Climbing the stairs can often become a struggle as you get older – even when you have four legs. But it is no longer a problem for these three dachshunds after their owners bought them a £1,500 stairlift.
Sheila and Harry Lee installed the lift after one of the dogs, six-year-old Pippa, had to undergo a £5,000 operation on her spine.
They had been concerned about Pippa and their other dachshunds – Millie, seven, and Heidi six – straining their low-slung bodies as they negotiated the stairs to their beds.
‘We saw an advertisement for the stairlift and thought “Why not?”,’ Mrs Lee, 57, of Ossett, West Yorkshire, said yesterday.
‘When the company we bought it from rang up a few weeks ago to see how we were getting on with it, they were flabbergasted when I told them it was for the dogs.
‘I bet they thought that I’d lost my marbles.’
‘Dachshunds often develop back problems and they were struggling to get up the steep steps into our bedroom, which is where they’ve always slept.’
She and her husband, who used to run his own brewery, trained the dogs to sit on the lift seat by rewarding them with treats every time they used it correctly.
Mrs Lee, a mother of four, said: ‘They soon began to enjoy the trips and they happily jump on the seat at bedtime, then take a ride downstairs in the morning. It is so comical.’
The dogs, adopted five years ago from West Yorkshire Dog Rescue, where she volunteers, are too heavy for her to carry upstairs.
‘The stairlift cost a fraction of the spine operation – and we might need to use it ourselves in a few years,’ Mrs Lee added.”
This story written by David Wilkes was first published in the Daily Mail