Animal rights charity PETA has published an open letter to Lily Allen saying it was “appalled” to hear she returned an adopted puppy because it ate her family’s passports.
Dogs “should never be treated as accessories to be discarded when they become inconvenient”, the organisation said. “It’s for this reason that we beg you, please, not to get another dog.”
PETA said it would instead send Allen a mechanical toy puppy, “which requires none of the care, patience, or commitment that a real one does”.
It comes after the Smile singer said while speaking on her podcast, Miss Me?, that she and her husband David Harbour are considering adopting a new puppy. However, she said she had already tried it once and “I took her back to the home”.
Getting a dog is “a hell of a commitment”, she said, adding that the puppy she adopted during the coronavirus pandemic in 2020 ate her passport, as well as those of her two daughters, Ethel, 12, and Marnie, 11.
While Allen lives in New York with Stranger Things star Harbour, her two children are from a previous marriage to Sam Cooper in the UK.
She said on the podcast: “[The dog] ate all three of our passports and they had our visas in and I cannot tell you how much money it cost me to get everything replaced because it was in COVID. And so it was just an absolutely logistical nightmare.
“And because the father of my children lives in England, I couldn’t get them back to see their dad for like four months, five months, because this f****ing dog had eaten their passports.
“I just couldn’t look at her. I was like, ‘You’ve ruined my life’.”
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Allen added the dog – which they called Mary and posted on an Instagram account they made for her – ate other belongings, and said “she was a very badly behaved dog”.
“It just didn’t work out and the passports was the straw that broke the camel’s back so to speak,” she added.
In the open letter, PETA’s vice president of programmes Elisa Allen said: “While you could get new passports and rebook your flights, Mary may spend many months in the shelter waiting for a new family – if she’s lucky enough to find one at all.”
