The Iggy the Dog scandal has reached critical mass, with news outlets all over the world reporting on the outrageous story of how a little pooch was snatched from a loving family after a minor bureaucratic snafu with the adoption agency. Ellen Degeneres, who gifted the dog to her hairdresser’s family after adopting it from the agency Mutts and Moms, has called for an end to the scandal, and asks us all to please move on.

People are so upset over how the dog was so heartlessly taken from the loving family Ellen transferred him to that they’ve been making death threats to the agency’s owner.

The woman from the agency, Marina Baktis, told the family she was coming over for a house check after they filled out an online application and then immediately grabbed the dog, holding him for two hours until the police came and checked its digital chip to verify that the agency, not the family with who Iggy had been living for two weeks, was the rightful owner.

At that point she fled with the little black dog, the theme song for the wicked witch of the west playing in everyone’s head.

TMZ has a video of the dog-napping and it’s quite damning. The woman is shown turning away from the concerned little girl several times while she clutches the dog. Baktis’ anger at how Ellen flouted rules by transferring ownership must have clouded her judgment and made her oblivious to all the bad PR that was about to be heaped onto her agency.

Baktis has already given the dog to another family, a fact that Ellen says she finds unbelievable and surreal. Still, Ellen says she doesn’t want any more hysteria over it and she’s not going to talk about it anymore unless there’s news that Iggy was returned to his last family. She says we all need to be aware of our rights when adopting pets and insist that they switch the microchips to the new owner’s names.

As JayBird mentioned yesterday, hopefully this won’t discourage people from adopting shelter pets who so badly need loving homes.