Ellen Degeneres is launching a range of organic dog food, and you can eat it too!

She tells Parade magazine, “Ours (range) is all human grade. It’s all natural. And yes, you can eat it.”

“People love their animals so much so that they put little clothes on them and necklaces and booties and things like that. And if you love your animal, then you should feed them something that’s not dangerous for them. There’s a lot of poisonous stuff that they’re putting in a lot of that food, those by-products.”

KeyeTV

I don’t think that Ellen is actually suggesting that you should eat the food, just that you can if you want to. Or if you are ever caught in an emergency, like flooding or an earthquake, it’s good to know that it is safe to eat.

This follows Ellen’s previous issues with her adopted dog Iggy, where Ellen and partner Portia DeRossi adopted the dog and then gave it away, violating their agreement with the agency they took the dog from. Ellen cried about the new family losing custody of the pooch Iggy on her show, and got a huge amount of coverage for situation. Buying and promoting a dog food brand after that publicity is a great business move.

I might also suggest that it is a very subtle ‘up yours’ to the Mutts and Moms dog adoption agency, since she’s now used her infamous love of dogs to make money, while they have only received bad publicity.

Picture note by Celebitchy: Ellen Degeneres and Portia DeRossi are shown at the Primetime Emmy Awards on 9/16/07, thanks to PRPhotos.

Star Magazine claims to have at least two “sources” that say that Portia De Rossi and Ellen Degeneres are having serious breakup-level problems at home. Their tenuous situation is said to have contributed to Ellen’s breakdown on TV over the seizure of the dog she re-gifted, Iggy:

According to multiple sources, [Ellen is] really in pain because her three-year romance with actress Portia de Rossi is all but over.

“Ellen would never have broken down like that on TV if things were right in her home life,” one source tells Star.

“Portia has been telling Ellen she’s very unhappy at home,” says a second source, who cites their 15-year age difference as one reason for Portia’s grief (Ellen is 49, while Portia is 34).

“When it comes down to it, she wants to be with someone younger and hotter,” says the source. “She wants out, but Ellen has been begging her to stay. Portia is really everything everything in this world to her…”

“She’s so terrified that she’s going to lose Portia, she just couldn’t go through with her everyday routine, especially doing the show,” says the second source. “The poor thing was so distraught, she could barely function.”

[From Star Magazine, print edition, November 5, 2007]

Ellen and Portia are also said to be having problems in the bedroom like a lot of couples in long term relationships. Ellen is said to be too tired when she gets home from work.

While Portia wants their love life to be more more active, Ellen is often too tired to keep up. “Her interest in sex is not what it used to be.” And that, reveals the second source, “drives Portial crazy!”

To compensate, Ellen is buying Portia expensive presents like horses, and she’s coming across as needy, which could be driving Portia away.

A friend of mine suggested it’s also possible Ellen is going through menopause. It could explain why she was so over-emotional on television over the Iggy debacle.

While it sounds like it could be true that Ellen and Portia are having problems, it’s possible that everything is fine between them and that Star is just jumping to conclusions after Ellen became so publicly emotional at the loss of her dog.

Meanwhile there is more more evidence to support Howard Stern’s claim that Ellen gave away an incredible 9 dogs that she adopted before Iggy. There was a story last week that she gave away a dog named Stormy without bothering to tell the original owners, and The Enquirer says she gave away a dog named Lucy in 2004. In Touch has her re-gifting two kittens in 2004 after signing an agreement to keep them. Ellen is said to just want to make sure animals are saved from being euthanized, and to be giving them a safe home until she finds a permanent family among her friends and contacts.

Update: If Ellen and Portia are having problems, they’re not showing it. They were out together last night at an party at the MOCA in LA, and were seen embracing and smiling on the red carpet.

Ellen and Portia are shown below on 4/28/06 at the Daytime Emmy Awards, thanks to PR Photos. They are shown last night in the header image, thanks to Splash News.

When the news of the Iggy the Dog story first came out, everyone was feeling sorry for weeping Ellen and the two little girls whose newly adopted dog seemed to be so abruptly snatched from them by the owner of the rescue agency from which Ellen adopted the pup. The owner of the Mutts and Moms agency, Marina Baktis, made a visit to the family of Ellen’s hairdresser after they filled out an online application two weeks after Ellen broke her adoption contract by transferring the dog to them. Instead of working with the family to find a solution for how the dog could stay in his new home, Baktis snatched him up, clutching Iggy for over an hour before the cops came and checked his microchip, which still listed her as his owner. Baktis then absconded with the dog and turned him over to yet a different family after the scandal broke. People were outraged that a slavish attention to legalities and red tape could strip a rescued dog from a loving family who wanted him.

The tide gradually turned on Ellen when we all had more perspective on the situation and realized that she had broke the contract her partner Portia signed under which it was stated that they would return the dog to the agency if he didn’t work out. Some people criticized her for openly weeping on television and bringing the whole media in on the situation, saying that she was abusing her celebrity status over a personal legal issue. A story also came out about another dog that Ellen gave away without notifying the original owner after she adopted him, and Howard Stern made the claim on his show that Ellen had regifted an incredible 9 dogs before, although this was never proven.

Now The Smoking Gun has all the e-mails exchanged between Ellen’s partner Porti DiRossi, the agency owner, Marina Baktis, and Ellen’s hairdresser who received the dog, Cheryl Marks. Baktis sounds perfectly reasonable in telling DiRossi and Marks that the dog was given to a new home in violation of the contract. She seemed willing to work with the new family to ensure that their adoption followed protocol:

Hi Cheryl,
We just spoke with Ellen and Portia. Iggy has to be returned to us today. You are more than welcome to fill out our adoption application online or in the store when you bring Iggy back. If all is well, we can proceed with his adoption to you and you will sign the same contract Portia did that states all of our covenants.

Our address is…

To expedite things, please come with your entire family including your dog. We do not adopt dogs to people we have not met.

I understand that you like Iggy, he’s a great little pup but the way things were done was wrong. This is not your fault or mine. Portia signed a legal, binding contract that if she could not keep Iggy that he would be returned to rescue. She violated the contract she signed and broke our trust. We are more than willing to consider you as a home for Iggy but not without meeting you and not without our process being followed.

Sincerely,
Marina
Mutts and Moms

[E-mail from Marina Baktis to Cheryl Marks dated Sunday, October 14, from The Smoking Gun]

Baktis’ actions afterwards don’t jibe with her written willingness to work with the family. Ellen’s hairdresser told TMZ that when Baktis came over she immediately honed in on the dog and didn’t talk to them much at all. I remember reading that the agency required that there be no children in the home under 14, and this family had two pre-teen daughters. Maybe once they filled out the application Baktis realized that they didn’t meet her agency’s stringent requirements and decided to seize Iggy as soon as possible.

Neither party comes across particularly logical or “right” in this case, and although there was a contract and rules it doesn’t seem like a dog should be removed from a good home if someone gives him away like that. Maybe the best solution would have been to tell the family that Iggy was with them on a trial basis. Their daughters were younger than required, but they were 11 and 12, not toddler-aged children who might grab and abuse a pet. You can tell that both sides just want the best for the dog but neither went about it the right way.

You can read all the e-mails between Di Rossi, Marks and Baktis on The Smoking Gun. Thanks to USWeekly for the heads up.

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.

Ellen DeDeneres tried to do the right thing – she went with partner Portia de Rossi to a pet rescue agency and adopted a dog. But when the pooch, a Brussels Griffon mix, didn’t make friends with her cats, Iggy wound up in the doghouse. Sorry, bad pun.

It seems that part of the dog adoption agreement is that you can’t hand the dog on to other owners. Ellen had passed her dog on to live with her hairdresser and two children aged 11 and 12, after spending $3,000 having the dog neutered and trained to be with her cats, although he must have been a slow learner. A representative from the Mutts and Moms agency came and collected the dog on Sunday night, prompting Ellen to address the issue on her show Tuesday.

“I guess I signed a piece of paper that says if I can’t keep Iggy, it goes back to the rescue organization, which is not someone’s home, which is not a family,” she said in a show transcript provided to The Associated Press.

“I thought I did a good thing. I tried to find a loving home for the dog because I couldn’t keep it.”

DeGeneres said her hairdresser’s daughters, ages 11 and 12, had bonded with Iggy and were heartbroken when the dog was taken away.

“Because I did it wrong, those people went and took that dog out of their home, and took it away from those kids,” a sobbing DeGeneres said on her show.

“I feel totally responsible for it and I’m so sorry. I’m begging them to give that dog back to that family. I just want the family to have their dog. It’s not their fault. It’s my fault. I shouldn’t have given the dog away. Just please give the dog back to those little girls.”

AP

I suspect that Mutts and Moms isn’t your standard rescue shelter. While it is a non-profit organization, the AP reports it doesn’t have a listed number, and when I’ve gone to my local animal welfare there were no Brussels Griffons, mixed or otherwise. But then all my focus was on the kittens and horses.

Still, I have to agree it’s a pretty nasty thing to take a dog away from kids. Couldn’t you just come and check that the dog was in a good home? It seems heartless to just take it away from a loving family because it wasn’t placed there originally.

Note by Celebitchy: Here’s the video about this case, thanks to TMZ, which shows that the adoption agency is pretty vindictive and cruel. The owner of the agency claimed she was “just going to do a house check,” when she came by, but then left with the dog after calling the cops. It’s all pretty ridiculous and I hope this organization gets new management and backs down, apologizes and returns this dog to the little girl who loved him. Considering that a celebrity is involved, this is incredibly bad PR for them. This makes me so mad.

Update: Here’s Ellen crying before telling the story about how the evil adoption agency took away the dog. Thanks to TMZ.

Last night’s Emmy awards were full of lovely gowns, with some notable hits and misses. We’ll have a “Worst Dressed” post coming up soon, and it was considerably easier to find ugly dresses at the event than it was to find ones that were spot on. The most beautiful gowns were just slightly risky with a touch of old Hollywood glamour. Simple shapes and bright colors were featured.

Thanks to JustJared for help with some of the dress designers. Yahoo! also has their top ten best and worst dressed last night, but I only agree with some of their choices.

Best Dressed: Heidi Klum in Dior by John Galliano, Portia DiRossi in Azzaro, Carrie Ann Inaba, a judge on Dancing with the Stars, in a lovely white satin and chiffon dress, and Kristen Bell of Veronica Mars in a beautiful blue strapless gown.

Beautiful runners up: Ali Larter of Heroes in red strapless Reem Acra, Kate Walsh of Grey’s in red satin, Teri Hatcher in Badgley Mischka, Minnie Driver in a canary v-neck dress with criss-cross front, Jennifer Love Hewitt in a strapless black dress with a gauzy skirt and subtle beading on the bodice.