...involving a daytime talk show host.

Yes, I'm talking about Ellen and The Dog. That should be the name of a daytime afterschool special about this thing, don't you think? Or a Lifetime movie event. Come watch the struggle and the heartbreak when beloved Ellen adopts a dog, gives it away, and gets smacked on the hand for it!

Enough already. Let's take the celebrity angle out of it for a moment. You adopt a dog, you realize that someone you know would really benefit from having this dog and you give the dog to them. You tell a friend about it who mentions it to the shelter that the dog was rescued from, and then the dog is repossessed. You're angry. But if you'd bothered to pay attention to the agreement that you signed, you did a bad thing. You broke a contract. Really, technically, there's nothing now that you can do.

Now let's add Ellen back into the equation. If you're a celebrity with a talk show then you tell everyone what you did and that's how the shelter finds out, and then you cry on the show to beg for the dog to be returned. And the shelter gets death threats.

Excuse me? Death threats? Over a dog? Now I know that there were people who were pissy around here when a dog named Bella was adopted out and should have been returned to her owner (and ultimately was) but I don't think that the woman who adopted the dog for her daughter received death threats. Some of you may remember that story because I wrote about it on this blog when it was happening. It's not quite the same situation but it's the closest that I've got. That mother never got death threats, and this shelter woman shouldn't either. That's just unbalanced.

But Ellen plays a huge role in all of this. It's because of her that the woman is getting death threats. It's because of her that this whole thing is hitting the media and the shelter is probably going to pay the ultimate price of less people coming to see them and adopt from them - because who rips a dog out of the arms of a young girl who has bonded with and loves the doggie, right? It's heartless, it's cruel.

Some people should really learn to shut their mouths and not draw attention to things that they want to be raked over the coals for. Ellen, this is one of those things. I can sort of understand why this is newsworthy in celebrity press - after all, Paris and Lindsay and Britney aren't doing anything scandalous lately and the gossip rags are looking for *anything* these days. But it's only in the press because Ellen put it on nationally syndicated television. And it doesn't really belong there.

It's Ellen who didn't follow the rules and could have handled this quietly off-screen instead of putting in front of her audience. There was no need for the theatrics that she's gone through. There was no need for the world to know. And there was no need for the press that she put out this morning stating that she's not going to talk about the dog situation anymore until the dog is returned to the hairdresser. Now, the way it read said that she wasn't going to "speak anymore" until the dog is returned which if read literally means that it's going to be a very quiet talk show (and another publicity stunt). I really hope she's not going that route and is just going to drop the whole situation. But she's going to drop it on her show today, so that means one more day of hearing about the dog and the shelter and the mess in the press.

She did the wrong thing, and she should bear the responsibility for it. I'm sure she knows she screwed up and she's probably really upset that her hairdresser is going to do something awful to her hair as revenge. Considering the small amount of hair she has I wouldn't be that worried if I were her. It will grow back. And we'll watch it all on her show, in public and painfully...

...just like this whole thing has been.