An Army soldier deployed to Afghanistan for eight months came home to find out the friend who was taking care of his dog, Oakley, sold or gave away the animal on Craigslist.
It certainly wasn’t the homecoming Brandon Harker expected.
He told Q13 Fox that the yellow Labrador Retriever, despite being a relatively large dog, never growled at anyone and was a lap dog who would run up to people with his body shaking and sniff them to check them out.
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Harker told the station that when his friend said he’d given the dog away, he went online to see if anyone knew what had happened to Oakley. Several people said they saw a Craigslist ad putting Oakley up for sale. (It is against Craigslist’s policies to sell animals on the site, it happens frequently.)
So Harker created his
own Craigslist ad to try to find his dog. In it, he said, “I am just trying to get him back to me since he was wrongfully given away or sold with out my permission while I was deployed. I will also be able to verify the dog is mine because he is micro-chipped and registered to me. Once again thank you to everyone who sees this and tries to help.”
A Facebook post asking for helping finding Oakley was shared more than
30,000 times in the first 17 hours it went up, the Daily Dot said.
The online community responded in a generally angry way about the “friend” (using the term loosely) who would do something like that. Many also wondered why the details on the story are vague.
Said OtherPeoplesSpreadsheets, “1. What kind of friend gives away another friends dog? 2. Who gives away/sells a dog on craigslist, but has no idea who they sold it to? No email correspondence? No cell phone records? REALLY? It’s 2013. It’s harder to get rid of old emails, texts, phone numbers than it is to keep them… Something smells fishy…”
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