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A stray dog left behind after the 2014 Glastonbury Festival has found herself an unlikely celebrity admirer: Dolly Parton.
Workers cleaning up the sprawling 1,000-acre Worthy Farm site in the days after the festival discovered a fluffy white lurcher abandoned inside one of the thousands of tents left behind by the 150,000-strong crowd.
With no owner in sight and no way to identify her, shelter staff gave her a name in honor of the festival’s headline act, who had just delivered one of the biggest and most talked-about sets in Glastonbury’s history on the Pyramid Stage.
The dog, now known simply as Dolly, was taken in by Happy Landings Animal Shelter, located near the festival grounds. Staff there describe her as a “sweet-natured older lady” who is currently being treated for an ear infection picked up during her time out in the elements. The shelter has been caring for her while appealing for donations and waiting to see if her original owner comes forward to claim her.
When word of her canine namesake reached the real Dolly Parton, the singer didn’t just find it amusing — she decided to act on it. Parton had her manager, Danny Nozell, contact the shelter directly to confirm the dog was being properly looked after. In a statement, Parton said that if nobody came forward to claim the dog within a reasonable amount of time, she would personally take her home to America. She also recorded a video message saying she felt “very honored and flattered” that the dog had been named after her, calling it something special to come out of her Glastonbury weekend.
Parton’s Glastonbury set itself had already been a major moment for the singer, drawing one of the biggest crowds the festival’s legendary afternoon slot has ever seen and helping push her latest UK greatest hits album to its highest ever chart position. But it’s this smaller, stranger footnote to the weekend — a lost dog and a country icon finding each other through nothing but a shared name — that’s continued to circulate days after the festival ended.
It’s easy to laugh at the coincidence, but that’s really what makes this story land: nobody set out to write it. A dog just needed a name, staff at a shelter reached for the most famous person on the festival bill that weekend, and the story wrote itself from there. Whether or not the dog ends up in Tennessee, it says something nice about how far people (and, evidently, celebrities) will go for an animal who ends up in the wrong place at the wrong time.
