I'm John Datsch who is my good colleague Jeremy Zuckus reporting on New South Wales and Sydney and the weather and climate.

Now we turn to a story that has a happy ending. Once upon a time, Molly and Peggy were best friends.

Yes, Molly's a magpie. Yes, Peggy's a canine. But, best friends, until knock, knock, knock, we're your government and

we're here to help. What happened, Jeremy?

Well, in late February this year the government came and knocking on the family's door of Molly and Peggy and they said, look, we know you've got a magpie in your house, we know it's a pet that's been on Instagram. It's already got a bit of

fandom but unfortunately a magpie is actually a native Australian animal

which means you have to have a license to keep it and unfortunately the government had done their checks and this family did not have a native

animal license at that time so unfortunately late February Molly got taken away from Peggy and almost instantly there were

Instagram photos of Peggy sulking there were photos of Molly the Mac Pie

having basically a very sad day there with that with the conservationist and

the veterinarians and this then went on for another seven to

eight weeks basically Molly was kept away from Peggy the owners of Molly

went back to the Queensland government begging to try and get them back together again.

Online, the whole thing blew up very quickly.

People started GoFund Me pages to get Molly back with Peggy. This is how big it got John, and basically they made international

headlines. Until then, Molly is in no way being harmed by being with Peggy, the family is loving,

the family is actually doing the right thing. It's just a bureaucratic

technicality that they don't have a conservationist and a reptile and an

animal license. So let's get them back together. What the government did was they

agreed to impose a short-term license until the family

could properly get their license to actually own Molly properly and the two

were reunited again in on around about April 19 this year.

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