The dogs who look like the hardest sells are often the ones who end up with the best lives. Penny, a black French Bulldog missing one leg, is the proof.
On January 26, 2025, Chrissy Teigen announced on Instagram that Penny, the oldest dog in her and John Legend’s famously pet-filled household, had died at age eleven. “Our beautiful little tripod queen, Penny, passed on peacefully in her sleep today,” Teigen wrote, noting that Penny had been there “for every baby, every loss, every joy.”
The tribute hit hard for followers who had watched Penny hop happily through the family’s feeds for over a decade. But the beginning of her story is what makes the ending matter.
The dog nobody was supposed to want
Penny came from Noah’s Ark, a New York rescue, after surviving what Teigen described as a horribly abusive situation. The abuse cost Penny a leg. In 2014, someone tagged Teigen in a photo of the three-legged puppy, hoping a celebrity signal boost might find the dog a home. Instead, Teigen decided the home would be hers.
There was one obstacle: Penny’s foster. Teigen later recounted that the woman fostering Penny was skeptical about handing a recovering abuse survivor to a touring musician, on the theory that all musicians were wild party people. She insisted on seeing for herself, so Legend’s tour bus made a special stop in her town. What she found, in Teigen’s telling, was how truly boring the couple actually was. Penny went home with them.
Then came the detail that sealed it as fate: Penny had been born on the exact day Teigen and Legend got married.
Eleven years of a very good life
Penny spent the next decade as celebrity-pet royalty in a household that has included Bulldogs, French Bulldogs, and a rotating cast of rescues. Teigen’s farewell post captured her personality in one line: she loved nothing more than being loved, having her nub rubbed, and destroying any ball she could get her paw on, right up to her final weeks.
Teigen closed her tribute by speaking directly to Penny, asking her to greet the family’s previously lost dogs on arrival: Puddy, the Bulldog she and Legend adopted in their first year of dating, and Pippa, adopted in 2011. All three, she wrote, were finally back together.
What’s new since this was written
The family’s grief turned into another rescue’s good luck faster than anyone expected. In March 2025, on National Puppy Day, Teigen and Legend announced they had adopted Dudley, a wrinkly rescue pup from Wags & Walks in Los Angeles. Dudley had arrived at the rescue shortly after the January 2025 L.A. wildfires and spent thirteen days hospitalized with pneumonia before recovering with a foster family.
Dudley now lives, fittingly, as the newest face of Kismet, the premium pet brand Teigen and Legend cofounded in 2024, their first joint business. It is hard to imagine a better epilogue to Penny’s story: the couple who took a chance on a three-legged abuse survivor went straight back to the shelter and did it again.
