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Meghan Markle and Prince Harry welcomed their fifth and newest member to the family by adopting a rescue beagle named Mamma Mia. The canine is one of the 4,000 beagles that were captured by authorities from a testing lab that infringed the majority of the animal-welfare clauses.
The Duke and Duchess of Sussex rehomed the slightly older dog as it’s usually hard to house them. Mia, along with eight of her puppies moved from Virginia to Maryland, then proceeded to travel to Los Angeles County’s San Fernando Valley, where the Sussexes decided to adopt her.
“The Duchess called me personally,” said Shannon Keith, president and founder of the Beagle Freedom Project. “She calls on my cell with no Caller ID and says: ‘Hey Shannon, this is Meghan.’ We talked for 30 minutes, and I thought, ‘Is this Megan Fox?’” Keith also said that Markle rang her earlier this month and particularly requested for an older dog and not a puppy.
Keith runs the Beagle Freedom Project from a home in Los Angeles and is also an animal rights attorney. As per the activist, the pair came to meet Mamma Mia “after hours”. “The Duchess is holding Mia and was like: ‘We’re adopting her,'” Keith said and continued, “She was like: ‘No, we don’t want a Christmas puppy … We want ones we can help who are older.”
Markle and Harry are both dog lovers and the mother-of-two is especially known for her love of beagles. Markle had two dogs, Guy, a beagle, and Bogart, a mixed breed, when she was initially acquainted with Prince Harry. Although Guy moved to London with her, Bogart stayed back in Toronto, Canada.
The couple also brought home a black labrador rescue dog in 2018, who they named Pula, in memory of the Botswanan currency, as the pair went to Botswana for a safari trip on their third date. In the same year, children’s authors Camille March and Michael Brumm informally narrated Guy’s ascent in a book written on his behalf called His Royal Dogness, Guy the Beagle: The Rebarkable True Story of Meghan Markle’s Rescue Dog.
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