Have you noticed that many homeless people have pets? It’s usually cats or dogs, but it could be literally anything.
Wondering why a homeless person would seek the company of an animal?
Well, there are more than one or two reasons why this could happen. First of all, because they are great companions. It must be awful to sleep on the streets, but having a furry friend around should make it a little more bearable.
Additionally, given that living on the street can be dangerous, having an animal around could provide some kind of safety to the person.
Finally, another good reason to opt for a pet when living rough is that it gives its owner a sense of accountability and also something to focus their attention on other than themselves and their current situation. After all, for many homeless people, rough living is a temporary situation, a transitional period between homes. In fact, 80 percent of homeless people are not chronically homeless.
Keith Walker happens to belong to the other 18 percent who spend most of their lives on the street.
The 53-year-old man has been homeless since the age of 13. This must be really tough. But, life has been much brighter for him since he got his four-legged friend, Bravo.
The man has had the pitbull for quite some time, and he adores him. He has also been in touch with a local shelter and arranged for his dog to spend the nights there and he goes to pick him up in the morning.
And that’s exactly what he was doing on December 18th, when he saw the shelter had caught fire.
It seems there had been an electrical issue that caused a fire at the shelter’s kitchen and it quickly spread throughout the building.
Although Walker was scared, he was determined to save the animals that lived there.
“I was nervous as hell, I’m not going to lie. I was really scared to go in there with all that smoke. But God put me there to save those animals,” he told CNN.
In fact, Walker saved all 10 cats and six dogs that were inside the building. Why? Simply because he knows what it means to share your life with a pet. Because he knows what it feels like to have them by your side and how devastating it would be for all those souls to be lost so tragically.
“If you love a dog, you can love anyone in the world. My dog is my best friend, and I wouldn’t be here without him, so I knew I had to save all those other dogs,” he added.
The founder of the shelter, Gracie Hamlin, publicly thanked the man for his heroic deed.
“He is my guardian angel,” he said. “Even the firefighters didn’t want to handle the dogs. They called animal control, but Keith was already in the building pulling out the cats and dogs until they were all safe.”
Luckily, shelter officials had already planned to move into a new facility the week after, so they just had to do it earlier.
After the accident, a GoFundMe was created for the shelter and they have already raised more than $8,000, while a GoFundMe has been created for Walker, too, with donations, so far, reaching almost $60,000.
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