Kaitlyn Bristowe is seeking sole custody of her pups.
After the former Bachelorette star and ex Jason Tartick agreed to split custody of their golden retrievers Ramen and Pinot following their August 2023 split, she detailed why the set-up is no longer working for her—or the pups.
“If you listen to this podcast or follow me at all, you know how important Ramen and Pinot are to me,” Kaitlyn explained on the Sept. 19 episode of her Off the Vine podcast. “They are legitimately the light of my life. It kills me to leave them.”
And the 39-year-old revealed that her golden retrievers have not been keen on being passed between her and Jason’s homes.
“What I realized in sharing custody with the dogs is that they get very scared and very uncomfortable and very anxious not knowing where they’re going and when they’re coming back,” she explained. “This is not personal to anybody. It happened when they are at one house, it happened when they are at my house. They get scared to leave. I just notice really big shifts in them with anxiousness and it was breaking my whole heart.”
Kaitlyn also detailed being reprimanded for the joint custody set-up she and Jason had in place after reaching out to the adoption agency she rescued the pups from.
“They were like, ‘This is not allowed,’” she recalled. “We would not let somebody rescue these two angel dogs who need security, who need love, who need stability to be bouncing around in joint custody. I think they even said that they could take the dogs back, if they felt it wasn’t fair to them.”
And while Kaitlyn—who noted it was in the dogs’ adoption contract to not do joint custody—ultimately decided to keep the pets permanently in her care, she emphasized that Jason will still have as much of a relationship with them as he wants.
“I would never keep them from somebody,” she continued. “So as much as I say, ‘I am no longer willing to coparent because I am doing what’s best for the dogs.’ I just want to make it clear that he is more than welcome to see them if he is in town for the weekend, or wants to take them for a walk.”
And Kaitlyn emphasized her openness to her ex seeing the dogs came from a negative past experience.
“I will never forget—and I’m not gonna name names—an ex said to me, ‘You’ll never see this dog again,’ and it just broke my soul to not see this dog again,” she revealed. “I remember saying, ‘I would never do that to anybody.'”