OK. I'm an animal lover. No, I'm not a card carrying member of the often fanatical PETA group, but an animal lover nonetheless. Particularly dogs - and especially Labs and Golden Retrievers.
I've had pets all my life. I can't ever remember not having a dog. Our last Yellow Lab - before our current Golden Retriever - came down with Pancreatic Cancer at only 7 years of age. She went from a healthy animal to a walking skeleton in a matter of weeks.
If you saw the movie "Marley and Me", the scene where Owen Wilson took Marley into the vet to have him put to sleep could have been taken from my own experience.
So I take it a little personal when news outlets across the country began reporting different versions of the same sad tale: Dogs, cats and other animals being found abandoned inside and outside of shuttered homes, the "silent victims," apparently, of the foreclosure crisis.
One Animal Protective League officer in Cleveland calls this "part of the revenge process: They leave these animals to defecate in the house to destroy the furniture and to urinate on everything to make it difficult for the mortgage company to clean up."
As more and more Americans have lost their homes to the wave of foreclosures that has swept the nation, a shocking portion of them, whether due to an inability or an unwillingness to find homes for their animals after being rendered homeless themselves, have simply left their pets behind.
Met two members of that "silent victim" group: Yoshi, a mixed Boarder Collie and Alaskan Husky. And Deke, a purebred Golden Retriever.
Yoshi was rescued from a home that we did a short sale on by my wife and my son's fiancée. My son and his fiancée now own the dog.
Deke was adopted by us from a local Golden Retriever Rescue group. Deke had been abandoned by a family that had gone into foreclosure and left him behind. The neighbors had the rescue group pick him up.
Although we rarely have seen this occur with the homeowners of the homes we short sale, it has concerned us enough that we have actually put the "proper protection of pets" into the seller's disclosure we use.
We will even go as far as to assist the seller's in finding adoption for their animals if necessary.
Yes, its not part of our job. But like I said, I'm an animal lover.
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