Zapf never gets too excited about anything. He lives on the fly and doesn't really care what happens around him. He says that this way he avoids unnecessary worries. For example, he didn't worry too much about what was going to happen the next day or the next or what was happening in another country. Generally, he lives for himself. Of course, this doesn't mean that whenever someone needs him, he's always willing to help. But he doesn't get involved in anyone's problems, he says that each one is a world apart. There is one thing that does have his full attention almost every day, except on Sundays when he rests, and it's his animal shelter. When he left school when he was young, he graduated as a veterinarian because he truly loved pets and animals in general, he really cares about them.
He worked at that job for a number of years until he found out that they needed an employee for a pet shelter. His job would be to take care of the pets in every way. So he left his job as a veterinarian on a farm to dedicate himself more to this. He discovered that working to take care of homeless and missing pets was something that gave him much more satisfaction. For that reason he left his previous job. He is not actually the owner of the shelter where he works, it actually belongs to a government company. Therefore it is financed with public funds and he receives a salary for it. When he started working the shelter was fairly new and had not been opened for long but now the years have passed over it.
The roof has started to fall apart so it needs repair and the paint is already a little worn. Even though this workplace was no longer as good as before, he still liked working there. Despite these details, what really mattered to him were the animals, he often told them that they were like a second family. Well, a family that would scratch or bite you if you didn't serve dinner on time, but a family nonetheless. Over the years, thousands of animals have passed through the shelter, from cats, chickens, and of course dogs. Once, they even brought in a pig that a person had abandoned. At the shelter, what Zapf did was take care of them for a while until they were trained, tamed, and ready for another kind-hearted person to adopt them.
Most of the animals were in the shelter for months until someone came to adopt them. So during all that time they had to feed them and spend on medicines and cleaning products. In addition, they had to pay for electricity and maintenance of the place. So a lot of money was needed to keep the shelter running. As you know, Zapf never worries about these issues because he only concentrates on the most important issues such as taking care of them, but without him knowing it, a problem was forming. Remember that the shelter is not his, so it depends on the government for funding, but the shelter was no longer sustainable. So without warning and without expecting it, one day Bernie, his supervisor, arrived with bad news.
He told him that the shelter was going to close. Bernie said it like that, very directly, he was a man of few words. According to what he told him, Apparently, the accounts did not add up, and the donations were so scarce. The state budget was no longer enough to maintain the place, so the animals would be transferred to other shelters and those that did not would be sacrificed. Zapf was outraged by the sexism, not so much because of the closure of the establishment, but because he heard the word "sacrifice." These animals were his family, so he responded rudely to his boss that they would have to go over his corpse first to eliminate some of his animals. Bernie told him that he didn't want that to happen either, but that they were going to do it, it wasn't up to them. Besides, they couldn't keep all the animals in their house either. When he told him that, Zapf began to calm down because he saw that he was right.
The two of them sat down on a chair to talk about what they could do. Bernie told him that the government's intentions were not to close the shelter, the problem was that the budget allocated to maintain it would not be enough. The only way to prevent this from happening was for the community to increase their donations so that together with the government's budget they could get the place afloat again. So they thought, How can we get more funds? The two of them decided that when they got to the house they would start investigating what could be done.
In Zapf's case, let's remember that he never worried too much about almost anything. But for the first time in years he had his first real worry. And to top it off, he didn't know how to solve it, he sincerely believed that everything was lost, until Bernie called him on the phone to tell him an idea. He told him that the solution was to create a web page to collect funds. Also, to attract attention to the page, they could record videos of the animals doing tricks and if those videos went viral, they could attract people to the web. That's when Zapf breathed a sigh of relief again, because he knew it was a good idea. Besides, there was still a month left before the shelter closed, so he had time to try it, and it didn't hurt to do so.
The next day he took the animals that knew how to do tricks and started recording them. Meanwhile Bernie set up the website. When they had both things ready it was time to upload the videos. At the end of each one they raised awareness about the importance of donating to the cause. So before uploading the video Zapf told Bernie to wish me luck. And he uploaded it. The first few hours the views were few, so they began to lose hope again. But just when they thought everything was lost the unthinkable happened. One of the videos of Paco the dog that dances on 2 legs, went viral.
This effect made the other videos on the website go viral too. As a result many people began to donate. It was already a step forward, but that was when the good part came. A millionaire from the city found out what they were doing. So he donated a million dollars. With that money they would have enough to maintain the shelter for years. Some would say it was luck, but it was real. Both Zapf and Bernie celebrated and even had a few beers together. They had saved the shelter, and all for not losing hope and saying that all was lost. Remember this too, you who are reading this and perhaps luck will smile on you as it did on Zapf.
Credits: The images used are free to use and royalty free. They were taken from pixabay.