by Lucy Riquardo

Created on: December 08, 2008

Their sobbing brown eyes blinking up at you from behind the cruel steel bars of their cages tell you the sickening truth: these animals have seen the great sorrow of life, and they desperately deserve a second chance at happiness. If they could make their whiskered mouths form the words, they'd say "HELP ME." But high-quality dog food costs thousands of dollars, and someone has to pay big bucks every month to keep electricity surging through the lights at the shelter. If you don't help the homeless animals, you know what they face? Horrific death in the decompression chamber, in which baby puppies and kittens wail mercilessly until the machinery sucks their last breath from their tiny, furry bodies.

I remember the first time I picked up a little puppy who had been run over by a diamond-ring-wearing Democratic Chicago alderman's big Lincoln Continental. He never even slowed down. I dragged her mangled body into my cold, grim apartment spent my whole week's beer money on ice and Bactine to get her patched up. Lucky Little Sunshine, as we named her, walked with a limp from then on, and she was always in pain, but at least she had a warm place to sleep by the radiator and nourishing table scraps in her furry tummy. She never complained. She didn't hate all politicians after that, or even start to vote Republican. Don't all mangled and abandoned animals deserve the same chance at life?

To keep your local animal shelter open, you have to help. You just have to help. You really just have to. Really.

Do whatever you must to raise funds for these poor animals, these impoverished parrots and guileless iguanas. Help the battered bunnies and the sick cichlids. Sell something from your home that you really never needed in the first place, like your giant-screen TV or your exercise equipment or your PSP hand-held video gaming system with the extra games you hijacked off the internet. Sell your expensive BMW and start driving a Pontiac. Notify your landlord, to avoid legal consequences, and then move into a cheaper apartment, sending the money you save to the shelter. Take on a second job, or a third job, if you have to; the grateful look on their adorable little faces, the smiles on their snouts and beaks and rigid reptile facial parts, will tell you you've done the right thing.

If your shelter still needs money, go farther. Talk your friends and neighbors into giving up the things they no longer need and want, like their winter coats, stocks and bonds, and heirlooms; if they're

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