OK, pony up or the donkey dies

LIKE most weeping liberals, I carry a heavy load of guilt.

It is a requirement of the left to be bent under a burden of culpability almost too great to bear.

I consider it my fault that there is hunger in Mauritania and that monsoon rains sometimes wipe out modest villages along the Ganges.

I take personal responsibility for AIDS although I have never been in a bathhouse, and for a frightening increase in leprosy.

Like Judas of Iscariot, I’m not sure I will ever be forgiven.

My mother, a devout Catholic, told me that the reason I always felt guilty was because I was. Catholics, she said, should feel guilty about how Jesus was treated. She never said how we were involved, but it instilled in me a feeling that I was responsible for the ills of the world because of what we did back then, whatever that was.

My sister Emily, who has carried on the Catholic tradition, prays for me several times a week, asking God to forgive my sins. She used to pray for me every day, but she’s 85 now and sometimes forgets.

What all this is leading to is that I have found a new reason to be guilty. It has to do with a little donkey from Sacramento, and I don’t mean a short Democrat.

We are on a lot of charity lists because we try to share our modest income with those less fortunate, who, to weeping liberals, include just about everyone. We don’t donate on the level of Bill Gates, exactly, but we try to be generous.

And now this.

Recently I received an envelope, on the face of which was printed, “No one wanted the crooked-legged little donkey -- so they decided to shoot her.”

This naturally caused me to gasp. Not that it particularly surprised me, because humans are known to shoot what they don’t understand, but why a crooked-legged little donkey?

Inside, it explained that the owners of this donkey and two others got them free when they bought their house in Sacramento. I’ve never heard of a house sale that included donkeys, but that’s neither here nor there. When the new owners decided they didn’t want the donkeys, they put an ad in the newspaper and sold two of them, but no one wanted the third one, which was, you guessed it, the little crooked-legged donkey.

To make a long story short, they were about to shoot the animal when the people at Santa Clarita’s Peaceful Valley Donkey Rescue heard about it and rode in like the Light Brigade to save it.

It turns out that the “sad little donkey,” as they call it, whom they later named Ilene, is the poster girl, so to speak, for a pitch to save what donkey lovers claim is the most mistreated domestic farm animal in America. Donkey Rescue has 478 of them.

I always thought that the most mistreated animal in America was the turkey, the fat little bird being the featured dish at an annual holiday feast. So I grieved for the fate of the turkey. Then I was told by the Ironwood Pig Sanctuary of Marana, Ariz., that the potbelly pig was everybody’s victim. That seemed odd to me, but I sobbed for the potbelly pig anyhow.

Up until I was informed otherwise, I had looked upon both creatures as little more than dinner. Turkey was something you stuffed with herbs and spices, and a pig was a pork chop or, to the average Frenchman, cochon de lait. I mention the French particularly because they are known to eat anything.

Now it’s lo, the poor donkey.

When I was a kid, a donkey bit me as I was trying to feed it a carrot. Not only did it lack Ilene’s obvious sensitivities but it also brayed in laughter after the bite.

It is difficult to feel sympathy for something that draws blood. But as a weeping liberal, I embrace all God’s creatures, except maybe the grizzly bear and the great white shark, who have not bothered all that much to curry man’s favor.

What Donkey Rescue wants are funds to prevent abandoned donkeys from becoming the kind of anonymous meat byproducts that show up in dog food. “Each night I pray for friends like you -- who care about these dear tortured souls,” the pitch letter says. Linking cash to compassion, it seeks ways into our “caring hearts” to convince us to send $25, $35, $50 or more to save a donkey.

Ilene, as it turns out, has met her maker, but there is still Isabella, who is clubfooted and “walks in tiny, agonizing steps on her toes like a ballerina.” She was but a pas de deux away from the meat chopper when the Donkey People saved her.

Since I have little to do with donkeys, it is difficult for even an open-hearted, tear-stained liberal like me to feel a lot of sympathy for them. So I think I’ll save my money and give it to a fund for mistreated cows instead.

Given America’s appetite for pot roasts and T-bones, they really have it tough.

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Al Martinez’s column appears Mondays and Fridays. He can be reached at [email protected].