A royal addition! Prince Harry and Meghan Markle expanded their family by adding another pup to the mix — a senior rescue beagle named Mamma Mia.
“The duchess called me personally,” Shannon Keith, an animal rights lawyer who runs the Beagle Freedom Project, told the Los Angeles Times on Wednesday, August 23, about Meghan’s inquiry into adopting another dog.
“She calls on my cell with no caller ID and says, ‘Hey Shannon, this is Meghan,’” the animal activist recalled. “We talked for 30 minutes, and I thought, ‘Is this Megan Fox?’”
Earlier this month, Keith met with Harry, 37, and Meghan, 41, at the San Fernando Valley house and told the L.A. Times that the royals purposely picked Mamma Mia because she is an older dog, as younger canines are more favored when it comes to adoption.
“The duchess is holding Mia and was like, ‘We’re adopting her,’” the attorney said. “She was like ‘No, we don’t want a Christmas puppy. … We want ones we can help who are older.’”
However, Harry and Meghan — who, in addition to being parents of son Archie, 3, and daughter Lilibet, 14 months, are the proud owners of dogs Pula and Guy — refused to leave the dog rescue without a special something for Mamma Mia in tow.
“[Harry’s] just like, ‘Well, we can’t leave yet because there’s something in that back house she needs. Does she have a favorite toy or something?’” Keith recalled the Duke of Sussex asking. After retrieving the object, the California residents returned home to Montecito with their new dog.
While the Sussexes are now at least a family of seven if you include their pups, it is unclear if Meghan’s labrador-shepherd Bogart — whom she adopted in 2012 at the persuasion of Ellen DeGeneres — also lives with them, as the Bench author had to leave him behind when she moved to England in 2017.
“He is staying in the United States with friends,” a source exclusively told Us at the time, noting there was a rigorous process the dogs had to undergo per England law, which is “extremely strict … and very harsh.”
Three years later, however, Bogart seemed to still be very much in Meghan’s life after she and Harry relocated to North America in late 2019. In January 2020, the royals were photographed hiking with Guy and Bogart.
In 2016 she told Best Health that DeGeneres, 64, was the one who convinced her to adopt Bogart in the first place. “You have to take that dog,’” the actress recalled the former talk show host saying when they ran into each other at a shelter five years earlier. “And I said, ‘Well, I’m deciding.’ And she’s like, ‘Rescue the dog!'”
Meghan added, “And so I brought him home,” joking, “Because Ellen told me to.”
