Ten Dollars

These days, ten dollars doesn't seem like much. It really doesn't buy a whole lot in this economy. With ten bucks, you can go through the drive-thru at McDonald's and get lunch. With ten dollars, you can put about 4 1/2 gallons of gas in your tank. You can pick up a cheap pair of cute earrings at Wal-Mart, shoot, you might even be able to buy two pair of earrings. If you have ten dollars in quarters you can spend about 30 minutes in front of a video game like Pac-man (or maybe that is dating me.)

With that same ten dollars in quarters you could probably spend about 15 minutes in front of a video poker machine in Tunica, where you might actually walk away with more than you went in with. Sometimes, theft is nothing more than an annoyance. Especially when it is something small, like the $10 pair of earrings that you bought at Wal-Mart. They really aren't worth anything and they don't mean anything to anybody, except to you.

But what if that ten dollars was given to someone else in order to keep them warm at night? Or maybe it was $10 that was given so that the recepient could have something to eat. Or maybe it was given to keep them from dying?

That is exactly was this $10 was meant to do: Ten dollars can buy blankets to help keep five animals warm at night. Ten dollars can provide two homeless animals with a vaccine that will keep them from getting parvo, which can kill them. Ten dollars can protect one dog or cat from getting rabies which can kill you. Ten dollars can be used with other donations to pay for an animal to be spayed or neutered, thus reducing their adoption fee and saving their life.

A ten dollar bill was stolen from the donation jar at the Bryant Animal Shelter on Saturday, February 23 between the hours of 12:00 noon - 4:30pm. I have no idea what the suspect looks like, except that they came into the shelter probably to either ask for help with an animal problem, or they went under the disguise of someone who was there to help. Well, help THEMSELVES is what they did instead.

All I can say is that I can only hope that the thief who stole this $10 from homeless animals really needed it.