Animal Instincts

One of the things I hate most about the recession/depression is that it's limited the amount of money I can give away. Less money to spend on stuff is an annoyance, less to spend on a cause can be a hole in the heart not easily filled. Of course there are other ways to give to a cause besides writing a check. But there's something about the ability to give money that makes me feel immediately empowered and invested: it makes me a member of a particular club of caring, not just a sympathetic somebody dropping by to help out for a couple of hours. This view of money and charity is an illusion to be sure, the American way to reassure a guilty and often under-informed conscience. But it's an illusion I sorely needed this past week.

I had heard the dog story last year. Somewhere in the Inland Empire a crazy man had killed a puppy with his bare hands as the horrified owner looked on. That was already too much information for me; a dog enthusiast and owner of three rescues, I assiduously avoided further reading on the subject. And then, this past week, reading the Times, I happened upon the followup story of how the man, a veteran fireman and Riverside resident, had been convicted of animal cruelty. Oh good, I thought, figuring it was safe to read on. It was not. The story reiterated details set out in previous articles about how Karley the shepard puppy had been punched and bludgeoned with a rock, how her jaw and eyeball and skull had been so wrecked she had to be put down. I screamed in alarm as I read at the kitchen counter the tale I thought I'd outmaneuvered, my dogs looking on in mild curiosity.

Sometimes there's no such thing as justice. I had an ache for the next several days, one intensified by the fact that even if I'd had money to give, there would have been no way to Save Karley or to mitigate her suffering. The thought darkened my mood, disturbed my sleep. And then, freakishly, I had a second encounter involving unfortunate dogs, the Inland Empire and a newspaper. A reporter for the campus paper at the University of Redlands, which I work for as advisor, was running a piece about an organization that was striving to help dogs at the San Bernardino animal shelter. As anybody keeping up with recession-related stats may know, San Bernardino is one of the hardest-hit cities in the nation, a construction boom town gone bust; its ailing animal shelter is just one of many casualties of shrinking tax revenues. The university story was about the Help Every Animal League -HEAL for short--that had enlisted students in a day-long project to help build cots for dogs who were forced to sleep in overcrowded kennels.

Here was exactly the feel-good I needed. I vowed to give money to HEAL. It wouldn't bring Karley back, but it would be a tiny bit of scale-balancing, a way to throw off this awful helplessness that had engulfed me all week like bad, unbreathable air. I could spend my way out of it. Plus here was this group in San Bernardino, not Riverside but close enough, a place I would ordinarily never think about except for that fact I drive there once a week, and now here, suddenly, was this opportunity to do something good for other dogs who lived not far from the scene of this terrible crime....

I explained all this to my husband, also a dog lover. He listened. He sympathized with the cosmic implications. He said no. "We can't give any money," he said simply. "We don't have any."

I didn't bat an eye. "Yes we do," I said. "We have to have it. I'll use my lunch money."

I sent off a check today for forty bucks. That's a few lunches, maybe a couple of dinners. Half a hair appointment. Movie tickets and a popcorn combo special. In a word, stuff.

The name of the University of Redlands paper, by the way, is the Bulldog Weekly.

Image by Flickr user marymactavish using a Creative Commons License.