Emmerdale’s Natalie J Robb has welcomed a new addition to her family after the heartbreaking death of her dog earlier this year.
The actress, who plays Moira Dingle in the ITV soap, has revealed she’s just rescued a six-month-old puppy from Spain.
Natalie was devastated when her pet Bronson died in February after 13-and-a-half years together.
However, the star told Metro how she is ‘already having a lovely time’ with her new pup Buddy.
She said: ‘He’s a Spanish Mastin so he looks like Bambi, he’s really tall and got beautiful black eyeliner, I think “Wow Buddy, how have you done your eyes so perfectly?” He just looks like a dog on stilts at the moment.
‘He came last night and he was all frightened and within two minutes he was cuddling us.’
Natalie also told of how she believes her late dog Bronson led her to Buddy.
‘I got this necklace made of [Buddy] and it’s got his chest fur inside. I wore it for about two weeks and then I saw this dog,’ she explained.
‘I’d had a dream about this beige dog with black eyes and a black nose as an adult. And then after I got this necklace, two weeks later, I saw [Buddy] as a pup and I just went “That’s uncanny, that’s weird.’ So I just enquired about it, and the next day they called. So it was meant to be.
‘He arrived this morning. I’m already having a lovely time because he loves cuddles.’
Describing him as an early ‘Christmas present’ to herself, she revealed she is planning on doing ‘lots of lovely things with him’ over the festive period.
She said: ‘Me and my mum were talking about going away somewhere nice and take Buddy and I thought “Do you know what, we’ll just go for lovely walks.”
‘We’re at the stage where we’ve got to get him out of the house to make sure he knows he’s not going away somewhere else now, because it was a long journey [from Spain].‘
Natalie also revealed how she has been pleading with Emmerdale bosses to give her character an on-screen pet.
‘It would be lovely, I have asked for it,’ she said.
‘I said it’s weird that I don’t have a dog – or a cat, because farms always have cats. When we film out on the farm, there are lots of cats. When we did the sequence with Sophie – who plays Holly Barton – there was a cat that just walked round the back of me and [the crew] went “We have to go again.”’
Emmerdale airs weeknights at 7.30pm on ITV1 and from 7am on ITVX.
