Foreclosures, people, and their pets

I'll never forget that time, about 25 years ago, when my brother and I were renting a house in Southern California and, after deciding to go our separate ways, had to figure out what to do with a cat that we had taken care of for about year after reluctantly agreeing to take it off of the hands of a friend who could no longer do so.

Long story short - on the way in to the animal shelter, an elderly lady and about an eight year old boy stopped me and offered to take the feline off my hands, saving them some money and saving me the difficult task of venturing inside the building.

While we've heard stories for years now in California about cats and dogs being abandoned as people lose their homes and animal shelters overflowing with pets that can no longer be cared for, it should come as no surprise that a similar situation exists in the area we will call home in less than 30 days.

This report from the Bend Bulletin sounds all too familiar.

Dinner and a movie.

In the world of dating, it’s a time-honored tradition.

For Mundee Maki, it was a way to spend one last fun night with her four dogs before sending them in four different directions and moving out of her foreclosed Bend home.

“The last thing we did together was I rented ‘Beverly Hills Chihuahua,’ and all the dogs watched it with me and I bought them McDonald’s. I fed them all double cheeseburgers because it was their last night together,” said Maki, 45, who works in the deli at Ray’s Food Place in Bend. “That’s the last thing we did before I packed up the TV and moved it.”
Maki, of course, is only one of many people in the region dealing with a change in housing because of the economic downturn. According to the Deschutes County Clerk’s Office, there were 1,160 foreclosures in the county between Jan. 1 and April 30, compared with 437 in the same period last year, an increase of more than 165 percent.

Maki’s story isn’t unusual. She and her husband, Cris, bought their home on Ocker Drive in east Bend at a time when Cris had plenty of work in building, excavating, logging and snow removal, Mundee Maki said.

But a couple of years ago, the steady stream of work began to slow, then stopped altogether.

This story actually has happy ending, something that came as quite a surprise - new homes were found for three of the four dogs and the one that was dropped off at the Humane Society was eventually adopted.

We'll have to put Ray's Food Place on our list of eateries to check out.