While America struggles with problems like a glitchy healthcare website, the student loan bubble, and a particularly stubborn Kardashian infestation, Romania’s issues are closer to the ground. Specifically, stray dogs that roam the streets biting people. A four-year-old boy was fatally mauled in August, and Romanian parliament, which I imagine involves men in fur hats angrily waving their fists at each other, passed a law recently allowing for Bucharest’s estimated 64,000 strays to be euthanized. Won’t someone think of the dogs? Steven Seagal will. The front-kick-inventing face of the Russian arms industry recently adopted one of those 64,000 dogs, proving that underneath that bulletproof kimono and the meatball hoagie stuffed inside it beats the heart of a true animal lover. (You know, as long as you ignore that time he killed a puppy with a tank).
Seagal visited a dog shelter south of Bucharest Sunday and adopted a seven-month-old black puppy in the long distance adoption program, which costs 60 lei ($18) a month. The dog will remain at the shelter.
“I am doing the best I can to bring awareness … so that we can make sure these accidents and tragedies don’t happen again,” he said in comments broadcast Monday.
He is currently filming thriller “A Good Man” in Romania. [GlobeandMail]
Hmm, so he’s adopting a puppy, but it’s going to stay in Romania? That seems like it would make the puppy hard to hug (definitely a sticking point for me). And I know Steven Seagal doesn’t keep track of space and time too well so I wonder if he’s thought this through. I guess it’s neat that you can keep a dog alive for little more than the price of a Netflix subscription, but put another way, the pitch does sound dangerously close to “give us $18 a month or we kill this puppy” doesn’t it?
If Steven Seagal can’t fly little Poonani (I assume that’s the dog’s name, and also Seagal’s Hotmail password) back to Arizona with him, he should just pop over to Russia and give it to his buddy Vladimir Putin. Uncle Vladdy loves puppies:
[gif via GifDistrict]