who really owns your rescued dog?
dog law and the power imbalance in the animal adoption world
What’s going on? I recently wrote about dog law and the dark side of the dog adoption world. It’s a thing, and you can read about it in the Daily Beast.
As a non-dog person, I was asking questions like, “why do you like dogs?” I usually don’t know how to talk to dogs and am often oblivious that they’re even around me. I was raised by Soviet agrarians who don’t really view dogs as preciously as American urbanites do. But this was an interesting journey into the world of rescued dogs, the law, and the power that some rescue organizations maintain after adopting dogs out.
One character in my story is Pasadena resident Chiara Tellini, whose adopted pitbull Vaquera accidentally escaped one day, causing Tellini to go down a ridiculous two-year rabbit hole looking for her dog. She dispatched critter cops, web sleuths and a whole underground network of dog hunters. And ***Adam Curtis voice*** what she found brought her to the nexus of power in the dog rescue world.
I’ll stop right there as to not giveaway the plot twist.
Anyway, thanks for reading and supporting this whole Debaser experiment. Happy goth summer and good luck re-integrating out there.
