Animals for Sale

I have been in the social services field for over thirty years working as a social worker. In my work there are times I see people at their lowest point in their lives. There are other times when I see people rise above adversity with strength and grace. Regardless of what point I enter people’s lives I learn some valuable lesson from each person I meet. Some of the lessons I take to heart and try to better my life with them, others reinforce for me that there is evil alive and well on this earth and we need to combat it every day.

A few years ago I encountered both the best of people and the worst of people in the same family. The identified client that I was working with was a wonderful woman in her mid-thirties who had a spinal cord injury as the result of a car accident. She is a mother of two children in junior high school. She met the challenge of being in a wheelchair with grace and acceptance. She maintained her sense of humor and put great effort in learning how to do for herself without the use of her legs. Her husband was not adjusting as well. He was worried about their financial security and was working a great deal of over time. One day when I went to the house to deliver some supplies I noticed that there were two beautiful golden retrievers in a kennel in the yard. There was a sign at the end of the road indicating the animals for sale. I asked my client about this and she told me that her husband had found the dogs on his way home from work. They could not find the owners and they could not afford to keep the two dogs. She said she did not like the fact that her husband had the animals for sale, but the fee they received would help cover the ads they placed in the paper.

A few weeks later I noticed an ad in the paper for a poodle in the section for animals for sale. I thought the telephone number looked like my clients; she has one of those numbers that is easy to remember. I called her to see how things were going and I mentioned that I had seen the ad in the paper. She said it must have been a misprint because they did not have any animals for sale. Some one had bought the golden retrievers. Shortly after this there was an article in the paper about the number of pets that were missing in the county. I did not think too much about the article until a few weeks later when my paraplegic client called me crying telling me her husband had been arrested. He had been stealing people’s pets and selling them to others. He was using the extra money to buy drugs to keep him going working the overtime hours. My client was crushed that her husband had been pushed to this point and he was facing a prison term for theft and possession of illegal drugs.