An open letter to Ellen Degeneres
Oct 18 2007
(Yeah, I know, slightly OT but we do discuss rescues and rescue ethics here a lot and I think this is in keeping with that. Also, I have a strong opinion on the matter and this is what I feel like typing about this morning so this is what you get.)
The news this week is full of stories about how the mean, mean rescue people took a dog back because Ellen DeGeneres gave it to her hairdresser. Clearly there is nothing more important to discuss, as neither Lindsay Lohan nor Paris Hilton has felt the need to flash their crotches this week (thank you, Jesus). Well, I’d like to have a word with Ellen, and while I doubt she reads the Fugly blog, I think it’s a good topic for discussion so I’m going to write it up.Yes, I stole the pic from TMZ.
Dear Ellen:
I read the rant on your official web site about how terrible you think it is that Mutts & Moms took back the dog they adopted out to you because you violated the contract by giving it to someone else that you think is a good home. I have read elsewhere how your girlfriend signed the contract, you didn’t read it, blah blah.
Well, Ellen, let me tell you a few things about rescue. I’ve done small animal rescue (in Los Angeles, as a matter of fact – but cats instead of dogs) and I’ve done large animal off and on over the past 20 years. I have seen pets dumped because they bit someone, pets dumped because they scratched someone, pets dumped because they scratched a piece of furniture, pets dumped because of allergies, pets dumped because of moves, pets dumped because of human pregnancy, pets dumped because of their own pregnancy, pets dumped because they got sick, pets dumped because they shed, pets dumped because they are too expensive, pets dumped because they did not magically become trained with no effort put forth on the part of the owner, pets dumped because a new boyfriend or girlfriend did not like them, pets dumped because they got old and were not any fun anymore and pets dumped to punish a child for failure to clean their room. The vast majority of those pets are dead today. In Los Angeles, more animals leave the shelter dead than alive. This has, understandable, made most rescuers – and particularly those in places like Los Angeles – more than a little cautious about someone’s good intentions.
You see, Ellen, most of those homes who dumped their pets to die started off with the same joyful enthusiasm about owning a pet. The kids were excited, Mom and Dad were excited, everybody was on the same page. The kids said they’d love the pet forever! Well, forever did not happen. Instead, those pets ended their lives on a metal table in the back room of one of those horrifically smelly Los Angeles shelters. (I am not kidding about this. Go take a walk through North Central sometime. The nasty smell will hang on your clothes til you wash them.)
And among the pets who do not get dumped, there are pets who get beaten for peeing in the house, pets who have their tails pulled and ears poked by unsupervised toddlers, pets who are lit on fire by sociopaths of various ages, pets who die on the road because no one made the slightest effort to confine or train them, pets who wind up as bait for fighting dog operations…the list goes on. The public does not often understand how widespread horrible deaths among small animals truly are. They grew up watching “Lassie” and firmly believe most dogs and cats live in these great, loving homes. Well, many do, but many do not, and you cannot tell from knowing someone socially whether or not they are a good home. How many of us have been shocked to learn a friend has ditched an animal at the shelter, someone we thought was “too nice” to do that? Or learned that someone with a Master’s Degree, who should be “too smart” for this, has a cat that is not fixed shooting out unwanted kittens at an alarming rate? Most of us, I’m guessing. And of course said friend has rationalizations…because, you know, they are the only person ever to have to deal with moving with a pet, or allergy shots, or whatever, and it’s just so hard and they really feel awful.
Ellen, speaking of feeling awful, may I point out that most of your post on your blog is about your feelings? I’m going to be absolutely honest with you, so listen up: No one in animal rescue cares about your feelings. They have one intent: To ensure the dog is never in peril again and lives as good a life as possible, including proper medical care, until he dies of natural causes. That is the only intent of most rescuers. That is why they are called ANIMAL rescuers, not human psychiatrists. Their only interest in you is how well you will take care of the animal. That’s it. That’s the goal of animal rescue. If you take great care of the animal, we don’t care anything else about you. You can be in a polygamous relationship, worship trees and hold radical political beliefs, but if you keep your pets forever and take them to the vet and don’t let them get dragged down the street by the UPS truck, you get five stars from us.
Ellen, you are not trained in screening adopters. I am. The ladies at Mutts & Moms are. Screening adopters is very enlightening and teaches you a great deal about human nature you would have preferred not to know. You will learn that people will lie about anything they can lie about. A family member with a conviction for animal abuse? Well gee shucks, we didn’t know about that, even though it’s our kid. A landlord that does not allow animals? Well, who knew that was on our lease! Golly gee. A drunken, loud, abusive family member that greets the rescuer doing the site check at the door? Damn, where did he come from? People lie to get animals, and they learn the right answers to give. They learn that they cannot say that they have ever dumped an animal at a shelter, that they should say the landlord is TOTALLY cool with that fourth cat, and that all of their animals are fixed, of course they are, the pregnant cat in the back room is just a stray they are oh-so-kindly taking care of. So, rescuers have learned to screen more carefully. We background check. We call the landlord. We ask to see the lease. Every rescue I know forbids rehoming without prior permission. This is not an unusual condition. It is absolutely standard. Some people think we’re overdoing it but we take the steps we feel are necessary to protect the pet. And that’s why we have a legal contract that you, the adult, must sign before you get the pet. Your hairdresser may be a great home, but you didn’t give her the chance to prove that. Or perhaps you knew she’d fail the screening and therefore took matters into your own hands? We will never know.
Ellen, legal contracts are not foreign to you nor are they foreign to your girlfriend. Neither of you is a cashier from a Quik Stop in East Texas. You two sign legal contracts for every single thing you do in your professional lives and many things in your personal lives. I am sure you have a lawyer. Why did he or she not review the contract before Portia signed it if you were unclear about the terms?
The fact is, you weren’t unclear. You just didn’t read the contract OR you knew what was in it but you decided you knew better than the rescue and you were going to place that dog – which did not work out for you for some reason you have not disclosed, but I’m guessing it’s a reason that could also cause your hairdresser to want the dog gone, it usually is. Well, Ellen, you didn’t have the legal right to do so, and it was NOT the best decision for the dog to be placed in an unscreened home.
If your hairdresser wanted to adopt the dog, all you had to do was return the dog to the rescue and tell them that someone else would like to apply for ownership. Not hard. You didn’t do that. Instead, you just skipped the process – much like Britney not bothering to get a California driver’s license, perhaps you thought the rules did not apply to you. That was a choice. Now you have made a further choice to act like a 5 year old. You went online and trashed the rescue and whined about your hurt feelings and emotionally manipulated the public in an attempt to get the dog given back to the home you picked out for it. Well, that went a little too far. You forgot that some of your audience is crazies that sit at home all day watching daytime TV and now they are sending death threats to the rescuers. Wonderful. See, this entire situation could have been avoided if you had simply taken the time to read what I am sure is a one page contract. And if you didn’t want to be bound to any terms, for god’s sake get a dog off Craigslist or from the animal shelter. Again, you had a choice. If two little girls are sad today, YOU, Ellen DeGeneres, are the person who is at fault. Look in the mirror, sunshine. Nobody should have given them that dog and represented to them that it was their dog when legally it could not have been their dog. You gave them the legal equivalent of stolen property.
I’ve repossessed animals, and I’ve also taken them back – again per my contract – when the owner honestly came to me and said it wasn’t working out. I just took the cat shown back this year when the owner suffered a stroke and had to go into a home. In fact, I decided to keep that one – he’s a nice cat and he’s already been in the actual euthanasia room once – a friend of mine pulled him at the last second for me, as I frantically texted her while at an arbitration hearing in Century City. He’s not going there ever again.
The goal of responsible rescue is ensuring the animal’s safety forever, not on the day you pull them from the shelter, or off the slaughter lot. You, Ellen, interfered with that goal – and you got called on it. Grow the fuck up and stop whining already.
213 comments to “An open letter to Ellen Degeneres”
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The last comment was for fugly or whoever wrote that crap up there
>>they were DENIED liscensing last december. they are opperating illegally which in turn makes all contracts singed since then illegal. < <
Um, back up. I worked with a NON 501(c)(3) rescue and our contracts were still legal. You don’t have to be a 501(c)(3) to create a legally binding contract.
As to the last poster, the reason the children were hurt was because Ellen or the mother or BOTH put a dog in the home that at least one of them knew, or should have known, could not legally be put there. That is why the post is about Ellen. Ellen screwed up. Ellen hurt the kids by not reading the contract her partner agreed to.
I’m not defending the particular rescue but I’m defending the right of a rescue to repo an animal when the contract has been violated. I don’t know the particular rescue and do not have an opinion as to whether they are reputable or not.
How do you avoid gut problems due chicken bones splintering when you feed whole chickens? Not calling you out or anything, just curious as I’ve heard this was a problem with feeding chicken bones. I can’t imagine 40 hungry racers carefully nibbling around the bones & eating only meat-lol.
No worries, I take no offense, lol. Raw chicken bones are fairly safe, it’s after cooking that they become deadly and splinter. And you’re right, the dogs sure love their food.
Huskies are trained from the time they are babies to eat NOW and eat FAST, during a race you don’t want a dog that is going to think about eating and maybe nibble… that dog is not going to be able to safely race and remain healthy, they harm themselves. The rules in the races and surrounding the sport itself are VERY strict regarding animal care and training. There have been mushers kicked out of the sport, blackballed as it were when it came out they were not caring for the dogs properly.
And in Alaska these guys live on fresh salmon and a salmon based kibble that reeks of fish and oil. They eat better than we do, lol. Wish we could get that salmon food down here, I’d love to have the house and agility dogs on it!
Oh and re:Beneful… the huskies like it as a treat… then again they adore veggies of any sort and since Beneful basically is one big veggie they think it’s heaven. We won’t give them much of it though, the other stuff we feed is much better for them.
In case this hasn’t been mentioned (I ran out of steam reading about a third of the comments thus far) –
According to the rescue group’s attorney, the hairdresser’s family definitely WAS offered an application, but they refused to go through any adoption process and demanded “their” dog back, period. The attorney (appearing on Bill O’Reilly) said he’s even got their emails to prove it. When the hairdresser declined to cooperate, the group placed the dog in another screened home. Obviously they don’t have a FIRM policy about kids’ ages.
We bred working dogs for 30+ years and have done strictly rescue for the past ten yrs. We foster for several rescue groups and I know of NO legitimate rescue operation that doesn’t have the mandatory return clause, for exactly the reasons FuglyHorse states.
For both puppy sales and rescue, the only rule we had about children was that if we didn’t like the little brats, regardless of age, the sale/adoption didn’t happen. Whether a kid was four or fourteen, if it was overly pushy, rude, or obviously didn’t mind its parents … just get the little SOB out of my house, dog-less. If you can’t control your own spawn, you’ll never protect the dog from them, either.
I won’t deny that there are rescue groups out there that are a bit ornery and hard to deal with. Some years ago we lost our only Boxer rescue and called a Boxer rescue group for another — they wanted proof of income, SSN’s, and a lot of stuff we thought was excessively personal. We offered the names of five vets who’d vetted our dogs, cats & horses for 40 years, but the snooty SOBs insisted on income data, so we told them to shove it and found our own Boxer to rescue, at the pound. I have no problem with rules, as long as they’re intelligently flexible. To me, DeGeneres’ rescue group sounds reasonable and flexible, and I have trouble faulting their actions in this.
As far as adopting un-neutered dogs — in rare cases, sure. I’ve seen dogs with AKC papers turn up in the pound, and some of them SHOULD be bred. Pounds offer NO exceptions — I would, though very rarely. One of the finest, sweetest purebred (and papered) Boxers on earth was neutered because of that, and it’s pissed me off ever since. He was vigorous & healthy until age 15, an unbelievable age for a Boxer. That dog should have been bred, for the good of the breed. Period.
ANd for whatever it’s worth, the rumor has been around the rescue community for years that DeGeneres has bounced back and passed on a number of dogs she’s supposedly “rescued,” and is on several DNA (Do Not Adopt) lists.
Thus endeth the rant.
Agree that breeding quality registered purebreds should be an exception to the neutering rule for rescues.
Too many rescues and rescuers do suffer from major “holier than thou” complexes though where they’d rather euthanize the dog than allow its adoption by anyone who isn’t perfect.
It’s a shame licensing is isn’t required for human breeding. Put these people in charge of that and the human overpopulation problem would disappear in a hearbeat.
Excellent post. While I really do find Ellen’s TV persona very endearing, and I enjoy her work, she dropped the ball on this one.
The one thing I wondered that you didn’t mention is, why didn’t they just foster the dog until the hairdresser could be approved by the rescue? COME ON!!! They could afford to HIRE someone to tend to it in their care for a few days until the proper transition could be made.
I don’t buy that they “didn’t know” the clause was in the contract…every rescue I know of spells that out VERBALLY as well as in writing several times during the screening process and the actual delivery of the pet.
What they “didn’t know” was that the clause would be enforced. It’s not just a “feel good” measure. DUH.
It’s funny that so many people who disagree about who’s in the wrong, Ellen and Co. or the ‘rescue’, agree that the story has hurt the image of rescue and damaged it’s ability to help animals. I feel just the opposite. If more people realize that there are bad rescues and bad shelters, they’ll be more careful who they choose from – and then we’ll have fewer of the truly ugly stories that give all second-hand animals a horrible reputation: the aggression cases and the sickness cases. One of the worst stories I ever heard was of a shelter dog who killed an elderly woman; the first owner surrended the dog requesting it be PTS because it had bitten before, and the shelter lied to him and sent the dog on to a new home, where it mauled a woman to death. One of the saddest stories I ever heard was of a woman who adopted a dog unaware that the rescue had done zero vetting – and the dog had distemper. The adopter lost 3 dogs. Stories like this are why I hear so many people say “I bought a puppy from a breeder; I’d love to help a homeless dog but_________ ” Fill in the blank with “I have kids” “I have a dog already and I don’t want to risk getting a dog-aggressive dog” “I have elderly parents living with me” “I can’t afford to get a sick animal” “I just lost a dog and don’t want the risk of going through that again so soon.”
That’s all due to bad rescues and bad shelters. And they continue to flourish because even good rescues often have a culture of hostility toward ‘outsiders’ and a dislike of scrutiny from either would-be adopters or anyone else, two factors that make it easy for a bad rescue to look like a good one. Is a rescue being unhelpful and refusing to answer your questions because they’re hiding something, or just because that’s what rescues tend to be like?
“Just Saying…”
Im’ normally not one to be so forward, but I fear my head shall explode if I fail to inform you that you are full of more shit than an outhouse.
Here’s the Cliff notes version, since you obviously have comprehension issues.
1. Adults agree to rules with no gun to their head and it wasn’t the only place on earth to get a dog.
2. Adults then break rules
3. Children are sad over the consequences of the broken rules.
Who is to blame? The adults that broke the fucking rules! Not the rules themselves, or much less, the people who enforced them.
The rules are there to protect the animals, they aren’t arbitrary or overly restrictive. Add to that, there’s a correct way to FOLLOW these rules and still accomplish a satisfactory end.
If ignorance is bliss, why aren’t there more happy people out there?
rescueweary,
Those stories about shelter dogs sound awful! However, the distemper story sounds a bit odd. Wasn’t the newly adoptive family up-to-date on their DHLPP?
Also — sadly, most shelters don’t have the money to vet everything that comes in. Our shelter certainly vets animals if they show signs of sickness, but sometimes animals are adopted while carrying something but prior to exhibiting symptoms. As a result, we have an agreement with local vets — participating vet offices will provide a checkup for a newly adopted animal within one week of adoption.
the rules apply to everyone.
While not exactly the most trustworthy site for news, it’s usually pretty accurate, and it amuses me:
http://www.wwtdd.com/post.phtml?pk=3035
So, nice. I don’t imagine there will be any more reputable rescues letting dogs go to her anymore. Perhaps she should stick with guppies?
I feel like I am peeking out from under the tent flap after a bear has ravaged the campsite.
Is it really two days since the last comment. Has the topic finally moved on??
Well I’ll leave a final little turd. After all the opinions, I don’t think we really know what happened, and I don’t think we ever will.
THANK YOU a million times over Fugly Horse for being on the right side of this issue!! I can’t belive how stupid the general public has been about this issue – Ellen was wrong – plain and simple and star power doesn’t always get you what you want! Thanks again!!