Doggone It

So what's the deal with Ellen DeGeneres and this dog-thing everyone's talking about? I watched the whole display yesterday with her bawling on air about the dog-adoption place taking precious little Iggy away from her hairdresser's family, and I'm thinking, is this really worth getting hysterical over?

Long story short: Ellen and her partner, Portia, adopt a dog from an upscale rescue place (that runs out of a pet boutique store) and sign a contract upon the adoption. They spend $3000 on vet bills (who spends thousands on a neuter?) and the dog won't acclimate to life with their cats. So Ellen ever-so-generously gives the dog to her hairdresser, who has two daughters, ages 11 and 12. They bond with the dog, everything's working out, until the adoption place finds out, at which point they say Ellen violated the adoption contract and they go and retrieve the dog.

Then Ellen has an emotional meltdown on her show, and begs the place to return the dog to the heartbroken little girls. The dog-nazis say NO, because their policy prohibits adoptions by families with children under the age of 14. And so it goes. Ellen dedicated another entire show to the issue today, and the dog people have been getting death-threats from devoted fans who apparently have nothing better to do.

Come ON, people!! It's a dog. The kids had it for a month. They WILL get over it. This is not a child, for pete's sake. Are death threats necessary? Would we really regress so far as to commit murder over a stranger's adoption of a mutt? Honestly.

Now, I admit, this doggie-adoption place has their priorities a little skewed. All over the country, millions of dogs are owned by families with small children, and everything's peachy. It's a little on the stupid side to refuse to let this family (who obviously has money - the mom is Ellen DeGeneres' hairdresser) with no history of animal abuse have this little knappy-haired pooch. And also, if someone had taken away my dog when I was 12, I also would have been heartbroken and wailing. But at that point, my mom would have taken me to a shelter and rescued a mutt off of doggie-Death Row to ease the pain.

I can't see spending thousands of dollars to adopt a dog in the first place, and I certainly would not enter into some legally-binding adoption contract regarding said dog. Once I get it home, I don't want anyone doing "routine home visits" to see if I am feeding it nutrionally acceptable food from an aesthetically-pleasing dish, and checking to make sure I've clipped its toenails to the approved length and washed it with aromatic shampoo in water that measured precisely 72 degrees... or whatever. Bottom line is that it would be MY dog in MY house, so the rest of you can get the hell back.

I think animal abusers should be much more harshly punished than they currently are. (In Texas, while animal abuse is a misdemeanor, it's still legal to kill a pet as long as it belongs to you.) I think the world is a sad place where people can't even treat animals with respect, let alone each other. But this makes a parody out of the process of rescuing animals. To truly rescue an animal, one would think this animal was in danger to begin with. Little Iggy wasn't in any danger of euthanization or abuse. He lived in a boutique and had fancier digs than me.

Ellen, do all of us a favor. Shut up. Then, go rescue a dog from a shelter. Fix it up, and give it to the sobbing little girls. Let Iggy go live with some other rich couple. I guarantee the dog doesn't know the difference.