Guillermo Rodriguez plays second fiddle to Jimmy Kimmel on his late-night talk show. He generally just does whatever Jimmy asks him to and doesn’t cause any waves, as far as I know. Until now, that is. Guillermo messed up big time when a pair of chihuahuas he adopted ended up in a shelter. He’d adopted Chase and Rey as puppies from Mutt Scouts and posted about them to social media. But they were surrendered to an animal shelter recently. Their chips still had Mutt Scouts registered, so the shelter reached out to them. As is standard, Guillermo signed a contract saying he would contact Mutt Scouts if he could no longer care for the dogs, so they called him out on Instagram. He claims it was all a big misunderstanding. But people checked Guillermo’s IG and noticed he’d deleted all the pics of him with Chase and Rey. So if this was all a big oops! why was the evidence of the pups erased?
Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night sidekick, Guillermo Rodriguez, is in the doghouse with a rescue agency that says two pups he adopted ended up at a shelter, but he says the whole ordeal started with a misunderstanding within his family.
Mutt Scouts, a dog rescue group based in SoCal, tells TMZ … Guillermo adopted two chihuahuas — Chase and Rey — back in 2021 when they were just puppies. He was stoked about the addition to his family, posting pics of them on IG soon after getting them.
However, Mutt Scouts says they recently got a call from an animal shelter in the L.A. area … saying the dogs were surrendered to them by an unnamed woman. The shelter called Mutt Scouts because both pups were microchipped and registered to the org prior to Guillermo adopting them.
The org took to social media this week to call him out, and some ‘Kimmel’ fans were pissed and noted Guillermo’s past post with the dogs is no longer on his page.
Guillermo tells TMZ … this all started when he was asked to take care of his grandmother’s large dog because she’s battling dementia. At the same time, he went in for knee surgery … so his stepsister had to watch Chase, Rey and grandma’s big dog.
He says his stepsister panicked the big dog was going to harm the two chihuahuas, and that’s when she decided to take them to the shelter. When Guillermo found out, he says he immediately told her she’d make a big mistake. He knew they should have gone to Mutt Scouts and says he contacted the group on Friday and said he “was sorry from the bottom of his heart.”
If I may clarify – animal shelters are vital to communities, and they work with rescues all the time. It usually sounds like shelters are hated, but they have good people working for them and they do everything they can for their animals in most cases. Budgets and other circumstances give them challenges, however, which is why rescues want their animals back. One big worry, of course, is kill facilities, which unfortunately are a necessity for some areas. The second is that shelters do not have the same screening and contract process for their adoptions. A rescue goes to great lengths to place the right pet with the right people. If they are in a shelter, the rescue – who knows the pet’s personality, how they respond to other pets, people and situations – has no control of where that pet gets placed. Put it the wrong situation, the pet could be set up to fail and worst-case scenario, someone or the pet gets hurt. Rescues like to keep track of their adoptees to ensure the success of the pet and the adopter, not to exert control. Please ask questions of the screener when you are adopting a pet. If the screener can’t explain the policy well, that’s not an organization with whom you want to make ties.
As for Guillermo, I don’t know what to make of this. The scenario of the big dog and the chihuahuas not mixing well makes sense. Although Guillermo had supposedly been watching all three without incident so I’m not sure why the worry in the new home. But it is possible with a change of venue, especially if Grandma’s dogs had been rehoused three times in a short amount of time. But the logic of surrendering your stepbrother’s dogs while he’s having knee surgery without consulting him is wild. And when he found out, Guillermo’s response was ‘oh, you should have called Mutt Scouts’ and not ‘you gave away my dogs?!’ So yeah, between that and the deleted puppy pics, I think he was unloading the dogs. Maybe it was too much with this new dog. Knee surgery is a massive recovery, maybe he was overwhelmed with that. I don’t know, but this was done on the sly for a reason and it’s not fair to Chase and Rey. Fortunately, the shelter caught it. But the pups need a foster or a new home. You can visit them on Mutt Scouts’ website. They are a good org, and they stand by their pets no questions asked, which is key. DoVE Project does the same thing. I know some cat adoptions that also have this policy. Always look for a rescue that supports the adoption for longer than when the money changes hands.
Xavier Collin/Image Press Agency/Avalon and Instagram
