A handful of pets, including the dog and cat pictured above, that were rescued from the Greensburg tornado have found a home at the Lawrence Humane Society.

The latest living quarters for Daisy and Tulip are a bit cozy, but that’s the way they seem to like it.

“They love each other. They play together, sleep together,” said Midge Grinstead, executive director of the Lawrence Humane Society.

The unlikely best friends – Tulip’s a 6-month-old Yorkshire terrier mix puppy and Daisy’s a 3-month-old kitten – have been through a lot in the past seven weeks.

Their odyssey started after surviving the nation’s worst tornado in years on May 4 in Greensburg.

Before coming to the Lawrence Humane Society with 11 other cats and 14 other dogs from Greensburg and Pratt, Daisy and Tulip stayed at the Pratt County Humane Society, a shelter Grinstead described as the worst she’s ever seen, saying it was dirty and stacked with garbage.

“It was just a really horrible situation. Any time you picked anything up, mice would run out everywhere. It was severe,” Grinstead said.

The Kansas Animal Health Department told the Pratt County Humane Society to upgrade the facility or close it. Even after Grinstead and her staff helped clean and reorganize the shelter, the Pratt building could hold only nine dogs and 10 cats.

“It was built in 1951, and the wear and tear on the building is enormous,” Grinstead said. “It needs to go away.”

According to the Pratt shelter’s executive director, it will. Mike Hill, who took over the animal shelter in May, said: “The animals were treated excellent, but the shelter’s been marginal for a while. We’ve been patching and patching it and finally just decided to rebuild.”

Hill said that after the tornado the building was overcrowded and the staff was overwhelmed.

No construction timeline has been set, but Hill has asked state officials to care for more than 100 animals rescued from Greensburg.

On July 15, some will return to their owners, but most will have no place to go. If the Lawrence shelter’s expansion project wraps up in time, Grinstead hopes the animals can move there. That project is slated for completion by July 1. The Lawrence shelter will receive no funds to help care for the animals, Grinstead said.