You remember Mistah Metro and the case of the tattooed dog from Thursday. It was a wild story: Mistah (aka Alex Avgerakis), a hotshot Brooklyn tattoo artist, went to work on his dog when she was out cold from spleen surgery. His said his vet let him do it. He inked a big ‘ol heart on her shoulder, then posted the pic to Instagram and waited for the accolades to pour in.
That never happened. Instead, he was criticized, his sanity was questioned, people wondered what planet he was on, and so on and so forth, until he was forced to lock all his social media accounts and his website and go to ground, but not before trying one last time to win favor by reposting the photo to a new Instagram account:
That wasn’t a good idea either. Soon, that picture vanished as well.
With Mistah off the radar, angry people turned to Mistah’s workplace, Brooklyn’s Red Legged Devil tattoo shop, to vent. Owner Chris Torres said the shop has been “besieged by angry callers — some making death threats,” according to the New York Post.
“I don’t condone animal abuse,” he said to DNA Info. “This has gone viral. It’s not good.”
And now, we find out Mistah quit — and Torres was glad to see him go.
“He quit. He texted me yesterday and told me he was going to lay low for a while. I’m not protesting that. I can’t have him back here,” he told the Post.
Torres defends the man, but he says that his actions were dumb.
“The guy’s not mean. He’s not an animal abuser. He doesn’t beat animals or tie them up in the cold. He just didn’t think out what he did,” Torres said. “He’s a nice kid. It obviously wasn’t well thought out. He spent thousands and thousands on the dog to keep him in good health. He cared for it like an old person in an old home.”
Here’s a video of Mistah’s mother-in-law picking up the dog from the vet.
Currently, dog tattooing is not illegal, but this case has prompted a Manhattan politician, Assemblywoman Linda Rosenthal, to try and change that. She’s sponsoring a bill to to ban all animal tattoos and piercings, according to Capital New York.
“It seems crazy to us that it isn’t already illegal,” said her spokeswoman Lauren Schuster.
Rosenthal and her staff assumed Mistah’s tattoo was an anomaly, but they were surprised to find dozens of examples of dog tattooing and piercing online.
“If a person is weighing whether to get a tattoo, they will consider the amount of pain the procedure will cause both during and afterward against the benefits that they will receive from it,” she said in a press release about the bill. “As we all know, animals do not have the capacity to make these decisions, nor can they contextualize that the pain they feel might result in what some might consider beautiful body art; sadly, all they know is the pain.”
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