Stop Dogging Me

I am a lover of animals and that is why the recent story about Ellen DeGeneres and the entire dog scandal I found very interesting. This is a textbook example of how the mainstream media can take a story and blow it entirely out of proportion. There are between 8 to 12 million homeless animals that enter into rescue shelters in the United States every year (Tresniowski, Jordan, Clark, 2007), and yet this one dog that was adopted by a celebrity and “re-homed” to another family managed to create more of a stir than those staggering numbers.
This is very much pop culture right now as you are not able to turn on any late-night talk shows without Jay Leno, David Letterman, or one of the other late-night hosts either talking about it or cracking a joke about it. I can see both sides of this argument.
From Ellen’s side, I can see how she feels as though she did not do anything inappropriate. She adopted a dog as she has many times before; she makes it no secret that she is a devout animal lover. She claimed that after almost two weeks of professional obedience training, the dog simply could not get along with her other animals. She then decided to give the dog to her hairdresser and the hairdresser’s family to whom I am sure she thought would give the dog a great life.
From the animal adoption agency’s side I also understand how they reacted as they have rules in place for everyone. These rules are in place for a reason and should not be any different for a celebrity than they would be for the public. They feel as though Ellen deceived them and that if you or I could not get away with it, then neither should anyone else, regardless of their status or fame.

Honestly, my opinion about the entire situation is that with so many homeless animals in our country every year who would love to have a nice warm home to live in, I really do not see the problem with Ellen giving the dog to another family as long as the adoption agency went through the same process with them that they would to begin with. I feel as though there are much more important issues currently going on in the world around us than one dog and who’s family it is living with; however, I understand that people are passionate about animals, (i.e. Michael Vick situation) I myself, one of them, and I know that this is a very spirited debate filled to the brim with popular culture. That is why I believe that this would be a suitable topic for a class discussion. I ultimately wish that every animal would have a warm and loving home.

Tresniowski, A., Jordan, J., Clark, C. (2007, November). A dog gone shame.
People, 68(19), 77-80