Kristen Bell had her arms full of a 10-month-old rescue dog named Elmo within seconds of their introduction, and getting him back proved nearly impossible. The golden-coated pup had been pulled from a county shelter as a stray just three weeks earlier, and his future was still wide open. For anyone who has ever wondered whether rescue dogs carry damage from their past, Bell’s afternoon with Elmo offered a pretty clear answer. See The Dodo Dream Date Video!
The character she would never trust with her dog
The meeting was structured around a game: mystery jars, each holding a question and a surprise for Elmo. Bell barely made it through the format. ‘Good luck getting Elmo out of my arms,’ she said, abandoning any pretense of following the rules. The questions kept coming anyway. One asked which of her characters would make the best or worst pet sitter. Her verdict was immediate. Eleanor Shellstrop, the morally compromised woman she played navigating the afterlife, was ‘the worst pet sitter in the history of television and film.’ Veronica Mars or Princess Anna, on the other hand, she trusted with her pets ‘any day of the week.’
Elmo, for his part, spent the session pressing his pink nose against her face and accepting treats with the manners of someone who had clearly never had a bad day in his life. Bell kept noting his gentleness, then catching herself: ‘My dogs are terrible. I took the ones nobody wanted.’ One of her two dogs has three legs and lives in a state of near-constant fear. The contrast with Elmo’s relentless warmth was not lost on her.
Senior blind dogs named Baxter and Red
Bell has been around enough rescue animals to speak about them with the specific fluency of someone who has done the work. When asked about misconceptions, she did not reach for a bumper sticker. She acknowledged that some rescues arrive with real trauma and real needs, then pushed back: ‘The vast majority of them are perfectly healthy, well-adjusted dogs.’ She has fostered single dogs, entire litters, and everything between.
The clearest window into her family’s animal life came when she described summers spent in Nashville, volunteering with her daughters at a sanctuary housing 75 senior dogs. Two blind brothers named Baxter and Red became fixtures in their visits. When Baxter and Red were adopted together, Bell made sure she would still get updates.
She assembled a gift basket for Elmo before leaving, intended for whoever his forever family turns out to be. She also requested full adoption details: name, address, phone number. She was not entirely joking.
The part she could not wrap up cleanly
Elmo’s pink nose pressed against Bell’s sleeve as she assembled the gift basket, his eyes tracking her hands the way a dog does when it has already decided someone is worth following.
By the end, Bell had stopped reading questions entirely. She said she was completely content just holding him for the rest of the day, and nothing about her posture suggested otherwise.
Wake up to Only Happy News!
