Today at the Daily Mail, the rag has published one of their usual inflammatory click-baiting articles, but this one particularly chapped my hide. Shona Sibary writes that over the last four years, she has adopted four dogs and then given them away when they stopped being cute puppies. She writes about this “addiction” as if it’s just some sort of personality quirk possibly brought on by not being allowed to have a puppy as a kid, rather than selfish and emotionally abusive to the animals who have been entrusted to her care.
I was all prepared to write a Just Look At This Asshole post about this garbage person, when I came across this post by Beverley Cuddy, published of Dogs Today and Dogs Monday, who says she was initially asked to provide a comment for Sibary’s piece. She says she then discovered that Sibary had tackled the subject of dog ownership before, also for the Daily Mail, writing in January 2012 about how she conned an animal rescue group into giving her two of the dogs (Albus and Juno) that she now says she gave away once they were no longer cute. Cuddy’s close reading of both pieces revealed contradictions in Sibary’s story that indicate she either lied then or is lying now.
For example, in today’s piece, Sibary writes:
….Albus, an eight-week-old chunky ball of cuteness, came from a council estate in South London. He was advertised, in September 2011, as a pure Rhodesian ridgeback, a breed I’d always been told are gentle giants. However, I was slightly suspicious that he had a touch of the Staffordshire bull terrier about him or, worse still, rottweiler, because his tattooed owners wanted only £350 for him, instead of the usual £700 to £900. Needless to say, he wasn’t Kennel Club registered but, still, what did that matter? I found him too gorgeous to resist….
But in 2012, she wrote:
There were times — during a ludicrously long-winded and bureaucratic process of adopting our two pets, Juno and Albus — that I wanted to turn to the centre and say: ‘Look, do you want us to take these dogs or not?’ So when, in June, we found a rescue centre in the South of England advertising six Rhodesian Ridgeback-cross-Boxer puppies on their website, we couldn’t believe our luck. They were 12 weeks old — young enough to adapt to our family and still impressionable enough to train and fit into our way of life. So I did something naughty. I’m not proud of it, but I called back the next day pretending to be someone else with three children over the age of eight. And no toddler. Now I could be considered for a puppy — but only if I had owned a dog as an adult. Otherwise I would not be deemed suitable.
Some noted differences:
- Age of the puppy/puppies: eight weeks (2015) vs. 12 weeks (2012)
- Where the puppy/puppies were adopted from: a tattooed owner living in a council estate (2015) vs. a rescue center (2012)
- How the puppy/puppies were advertised: as pure Rhodesian Ridgebacks (2015) vs. Rhodesian Ridgeback-cross-Boxer (2012)
In this weekend’s piece, Sibary writes that by April 2012 she had decided to give both dogs away. But in her January 2012 piece, just four months before she decided to give the dogs away because they were no longer cute enough for her, Sibary had the gall to whine about how she had to lie in order to adopt these dogs because of the rescue center’s strict standards:
I was starting to feel more than a little irritated. We had already expended a huge amount of time, money and energy in meeting their re-homing requirements. Sending a warden to assess our home seemed to be an excessive measure. Let’s not forget we are talking about a dog — not a child. We were clearly a nice, middle-class family trying to do the right thing by giving not one, but two, strays a loving future with our family. But their stance through the entire process was one of distrust and annoying superiority. …
Now that they’re with us, it all feels worth it. They’ve brought that wonderful doggy spark back into our lives — wrestling for space on the sofa and barking endlessly at washing drying on the line. …
In fact, I can’t imagine our lives without them. Which is a shame, because they still don’t legally belong to us.
If you believe the piece written today, Juno and Albus, the two dogs she supposedly wanted to give a loving home and lied to a rescue center in order to do so, no longer belong to Sibary BECAUSE SHE GAVE THEM AWAY. Because they were no longer cute. But how exactly did she acquire Juno and Albus and the other dogs she supposedly adopted and then gave away when they got too big? Did she ever own these dogs in the first place? Is this woman just making shit up all willy nilly?
Seriously, what is Shona Sibary’s deal and why does she seemingly have a writing career based on her sociopathic relationship with pet adoption? I need answers.
Original by Amelia McDonell-Parry @xoamelia
