Better Deals

I started "reading" "the paper" a few months ago. (I put "the paper" in quotes because I haven't read anything in print since 2001. And I put "reading" in quotes because I'm illiterate.) In my reading this morning, I encountered an interesting article documenting yet another detail in the depravity of mankind.

Apparently a woman traded two children to an infertile couple for a pet cockatoo and some cash. $175, to be precise.

This, while absolutely horrifying, is a terrible deal. Two children should be able to draw at least two cockatoos. I mean, it hardly seems an even trade to get one bird for two presumably healthy human beings.

According to the article, the bird was for sale for $1500, so this woman, who originally just wanted to buy the bird, offered the kids for the bird instead, and the $175 for legal fees for the adoption. So many things wrong with this deal. I'll just go through them one by one.

-Breaking this down mathematically, each kid ends up going for about $850. Even in this economy, a five-year-old would have no problem pulling $2000 on the open market.
-If I was a bird owner and reasonably thought someone would buy my bird for $1500, it would be much more profitable for me to sell the bird than to trade it for two items that will end up costing me like a million dollars over the next fifteen years.
-The woman trading these kids wasn't even their mother! GAH! This all happened in Louisiana, and the mother is apparently somewhere in Texas, doing God knows what. She left them in the care of this woman, who apparently has a significant arrest record, so big surprise that the kids were almost traded for a pet bird.
-Why would you want a payoff for legal fees when this deal is so clearly illegal? And if it was just a chance to collect some quick cash, why not ask for more than $175? It's almost as if she thought about how much she could reasonably ask for and still pass it off as a "legal fee," which would officially make this the most thought-out part of the whole deal.
-When the kids were taken into police custody, someone from the sherrif's office commented, "The kids were well-dressed and seemed to be treated good." Grammar issues aside, I assume this means that at least one of them had shoes and that they were wearing shirts under their overalls.
-Who wants a cockatoo anyway?

Seriously, this was all motivated by a cockatoo. One of these:


I don't get it.