How does one use $wpdb to query custom tables?

This is a hypothetical trivial example just to make things easier. It’s exactly what I’m trying to do, but in very simple terms.

I created a table called ‘animals’ in the wordpress database. it has a list of animal names.

To begin with, how do I query the list of names from the table?

I created a function in functions.php called “mysite_list_animals”.

It simply has:

<?php
function mysite_list_animals() {
include_once(‘wp-config.php’);
include_once(‘wp-load.php’);
include_once(‘wp-includes/wp-db.php’);
$myrows = $wpdb->get_results( “SELECT name FROM animals” );
}
?>

I want to call this function from a page so in page.php I entered:

<?php mysite_list_animals(); ?>

I searched through two books, the codex and other online material but couldn’t figure out why it doesn’t work.

Here are some basic questions I couldn’t find answers to:

1) does the “$wpdb->get_results” function automatically print out the results? Or, do I have to iterate through the array?

2) is the functions the correct place to put this, or should it be a plugin? (I imagine this is discretionary).

Any other help to get this dang thing to work would be appreciated.

thanks.