While it's true we've rarely seen Harvard's Woman of the Year Paris Hilton far from at least one member of her four-legged menagerie, had you asked us to guess just how many animals co-exist with her behind the walls of her gated estate, we would have probably thrown out a number like a half-dozen: a chihuahua, a kinkajou, a billy goat, couple ducks, maybe an emu for good measure. Never, however, in our wildest, animal-exploiting, poopie-bedsheet dreams, did the following occur to us:

That Hilton might be harboring—you may need to sit down for this—no fewer than 17 dogs. That was the number she offered a clearly mortified Ellen DeGeneres, whose commitment to controlling the L.A. animal population is the stuff of legend. (Wait a second—did she just say 17 dogs? We believe she did.) Hearing the outrageous admission that her own laziness has transformed her home into a berserk chihuaha breeding colony, we're now forced to reconsider Hilton's last visit to Ellen's show to dispel all those "ridiculous" rumors, and question if the heiress isn't perhaps hoarding a drunk-elephant petting zoo in her back yard after all.