When reporters for the Tampa Bay Times noticed they hadn’t seen Florida Gov. Rick Scott’s dog Reagan since shortly after he was inaugurated in 2011, they pressed his former communications director, Brian Burgess, on what had happened to the dog Scott adopted shortly after he won the state’s GOP nomination in 2010. Burgess refused to answer the question, and he got a little testy: “He wouldn’t say where the dog was and accused reporters of ‘surfing some old Facebook or website pages.’ At one point an exasperated reporter asked Burgess if he had killed the dog, and Burgess denied ever killing a dog, but still wouldn’t say where Reagan was.” After inquiries over the course of last week, the Scott family finally conceded it had given back the dog to its previous owner because Reagan, a rescue dog, couldn’t stop barking whenever he saw someone carrying something. It just so happens they made that decision right after the governor was sworn in, which doesn’t necessarily mean he cynically used the dog as a campaign prop, but as Gawker points out, the timing sure is suspicious.
