The friend had decided to return to rehab, but she needed Knight’s help. “She told me, ‘I need you to take me down to the shelter so I can surrender Jayde, because I have nowhere to put her,’ ” says Knight, who’s now 66. He looked into Jayde’s eyes and instantly felt a connection. So rather than help surrender the scruffy black dog, he offered to take care of Jayde himself. “It was kind of life-changing,” he says.

Within the year, the former schoolteacher would start fostering dogs for other addicts on the road to recovery, eventually opening a nonprofit called Dogs Matter, which he says has helped more than 2,500 dogs and cats when their owners had nowhere left to turn.

But Knight had none of this in mind when he took Jayde in, back in 2012. He just wanted a reason to feel normal again. Although he had managed to stop using crystal meth, Knight worried about relapsing. Many of his closest friends and family had given up on him, and he felt “very much alone.”

Until Jayde entered the picture.

For Knight, it was entirely new terrain. He was suddenly responsible for another living thing. “I had to wake up in the morning and walk her. I had to feed her,” he says. “I just couldn’t lay in bed and feel sorry for myself.”

When Knight realized that his friend wasn’t the only fellow addict who needed pet care while she was in rehab, he decided to do something. His original goal was to foster just a few dogs a year while their owners were in treatment. But that first year, he took in nine dogs. By 2015, Dogs Matter had become a registered nonprofit, requiring participants to complete a recovery plan before they got their pets back, then continuing to support them in their recovery for a year with counseling and respite pet care. Today, Knight shares his home with four dogs—including 18-year-old Jayde, who developed such a bond with Knight that she became a permanent member of his family.

About 25 percent of the pet owners his nonprofit helps are over 50—an age at which some addicts wrongly think that their time for recovery has passed. “So many people have given up on themselves after the age of 50 and just say, ‘This is the way I’m going to die,’ ” says Knight. “I’ve been there, so I know that it’s never too late to change your life.” —Eric Spitznagel