Sorry, Ms. Havrilesky, but you come across as the standard-issue whiny it's-all-about-me denizen of West Side Los Angeles with your lament about the animal rescuers.

I have to come down on their side, from my own experience.

About 12 years ago, while I was involved in taking a script and pushing it through to production with my then-partner, I moved to a new place and found a cat living outside who, it quickly apparent, had once lived inside where I was, but had been abandoned. Since I had three cats of my own there, I didn't feel able to keep him, but he was so nice I decided I would find him a new and better home with a good person. As it happened, my producing partner had just lost her cat to old age, and was open to adopting little Martin. He seemed overjoyed to find himself the only kitty in a big house over in Cheviot Hills. Then I got involved with some other work (the paying kind) and wasn't around for a month. When I went over to pick her up for a meeting on our project, the cat was nowhere to be found. When I asked what had happened, she airily told me "he didn't work out," and then when I asked why she hadn't called me to come get him, said she'd taken him to the pound two weeks earlier. That meant in those days that he was dead by then. He "hadn't worked out" because it took him a bit longer to re-learn being a civilized indoor kitty after a year spent surviving on his own.

We didn't go to that meeting, and I haven't spoken to that woman since that day. I don't do business with people capable of doing things like that if I don't have to, or consider them friends.

Too often, Ms. Havrilesky, people want "perfect pets" and if the animal "doesn't work out" they think of it like a piece of used toilet paper, to be gotten rid of. Animals are just like people (only better, since I have yet to meet an animal who lies, cheats, or steals), and none of them are any more perfect than any of us are. If a person can't deal with that, they have no business having an animal in their life. Sadly, such attitudes aren't readily apparent, so if one has the animal's welfare in mind, one has to pay close attention to who gets the animal, and what they do afterwards with the animal. Little Martin could have had a good life, with just a phone call - he'd have been out of her life, no longer "acting inappropriately," and much happier with someone who had the patience and the love to give him what he needed.

Unfortunately, most humans (especially those who live on the West Side of Los Angeles and work in "our thing") don't know what patience or love is if they trip over it.

Ellen DeGeneres has the integrity to admit she was wrong. She should have the animal people come on her show and explain things in words of no more than one syllable, so that obvious halfwits like you can "get it."