A Bird in the Hand…
Posted by logun on February 27th, 2009…is worth two children sold by their caretaker. In a story you can read here we find out that a woman responded to an ad for a $1,500 pet cockatoo by offering, as a trade, two of the three children she is taking care of. Apparently the biological parents were going through a separation and were not involved in the trade. But let’s just get this out there: if the person you chose as guardian of your children tries to sell them for a pet cockatoo, your impending divorce is the least of your worries.
Now I realize these are hard times, but trading two children for a bird is a very lopsided offer. According to this site the spare parts alone are worth tens of thousands of dollars. With kidneys going for between $1,000 and $5,000, this caretaker was sitting on an organ goldmine. Not to mention that it is a well-known fact Brangelina is looking for a Southern child to adopt and is willing to pay top dollar. Or how about the Octo-mom, with her family of 14? She’d take on a dozen more kids to stretch her TV exposure by even a few minutes.
And back to one very important point: $1,500 for a cockatoo?!? Are you out of your freaking mind? All cockatoos do is squawk all day, eat, bite your fingers, squawk at midnight, scare small children and coat a ten foot radius of their cage in green and white crap. This lady already had three kids to take care of, why would she want what basically amounts to one more?
Sadly, the entire scheme wasn’t discovered until all three children had been living with their “new families” for some time. It is unknown if the third child was traded for a birdcage or simply thrown in as a ‘buy two, get one free’ type of offer. The children have been placed in foster care now, but I hope the foster parents have been made aware of the situation, because if these kids ever watch Sesame Street, Big Bird is going to scare the shit out of them.
[...] we’re all going to be sitting around selling gold and babies for money, playing video games and not having to work out? Maybe the recession ain’t so [...]