Another Foreclosure Casualty: Pets

No one wants to see anyone lose their home.  But it’s hard to have sympathy for people who flee their homes and leave their pets behind, which, according to media reports, is becoming a trend.

Here’s a quote from this story from the L.A. Times:

Leo Nordine, a Hermosa Beach broker who specializes in selling repossessed homes, said he finds abandoned dogs at least once a month these days. Sometimes they’re chained in a yard, sometimes locked in the house. They’re often emaciated, if they’re alive at all.

This Associated Press story confirms the problem:

The house was ravaged — its floors ripped, walls busted and lights smashed by owners who trashed their home before a bank foreclosed on it. Hidden in the wreckage was an abandoned member of the family: a starving pit bull.

Of course, not everyone facing foreclosure is abandoning pets.  But when you give oversize mortgages to people with a history of not honoring their debts, you get people trashing their homes before they leave and leaving their animals to fend for themselves.

These are people I don’t feel sorry for at all.  Anyone who would abandon an animal is not a decent person.  They don’t care that animals are completely dependent on humans and helpless to take care of themselves.  Humans, on the other hands, have plenty of options.

If people are abandoning homes in  your neighborhood, do a good deed and make sure their pets aren’t still there.  If they are, please help find them homes or take them to a shelter, where at least they’ll have a fighting chance.

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