Barbour County Index

A Dealer in Dogs Says the Disease Is Not Incurable.

Hard Balls of a Mysterious Substance Frequently Found In Canine Stomachs -What Will Cure Mad Dogs or Prevent Them from Going Mad.

[N. Y. World.]

Any one riding in the Fourth avenue cars can notice in passing through Broome street, a few cages filled with chickens piled together above a cellar door, and surmounted by the remains of what was once a dog, who is there to signify to the passing multitude that Mr. James Young has more and fresher canines for sale below.

That dog was once a triumph of the taxidermist's art, and except that his bark was out of order, no one would know that he had obtained Nirvana; but wind and weather have worked sad ravages, and left him bald as an old kid glove. He sags in places, and his wan, glass eyes bulge out too much, but he seems to remind the world that his owner holds some original views on the subject of dogs who are called mad.

"There never was a dog what was called crazy but you'd find when you'd cut him open he'd something wrong in his stomach, something that oughtn't to be there," said the dog-fancier, didactically.

When Dr. Mott, who is experimenting with Dr. Pasteur's methods in this city, made a post-mortem examination of the dog who bit the first child he inoculated, he found a hard ball in its stomach, which appeared to be composed of the hempen fibers of a door-mat. This was so remarkable a confirmation of Mr. Young's statement that he was induced by a reporter to tell about it.

"Yes, I saw that," said the dog-dealer, in reference to Mott's statement. "And it's just like I said before. When a dog's what folks call mad, you'll always find a ball like that in his stomach. Sometimes it's hair, sometimes it's wool and sometimes it's the door mat, but the trouble's always the same. Here's the way it is:

A dog that's kept chained up in his kennel or in a city house, the moment you let him out where there's grass you'll notice he will eat a lot of the coarsest grass he can find, and then he goes a little further and throws it up. Now, that's his instinct. He knows he needs medicine, because shut up like that he doesn't get proper exercise, and most times not the right food, either, so he knows he's got to clear out his stomach in some way. Dog's got a great deal of their own hair inside of them from biting it, and those what's in the house breathes in a lot of lint and dust of the carpets. Well, of course, that don't digest, and they begin chewing the door-mat or eating straw, and it forms a lump that the juices in the stomach makes harder and harder. Why, many's the time I've seen them lumps taken out of a dead dog so hard you couldn't break them with a hatchet. Now how do you think you'd act with one of them lumps on your insides?

"I remember a year or two ago in Jersey a man had a pair of greyhounds and he'd refused one thousand six hundred dollars for one of them. Well, he telegraphed some doctors who were interested in the matter, that the dog had gone mad and was chained up in his cellar. The owner was afraid it might burst through the window, and so shot it, and sent it warm to the doctors for dissection. Well, now, inside that dog they found a big rag. Greyhounds have to be dieted to preserve their shape, and one day when he was famished the cook dropped her greasy dish-rag in his food by accident, and he bolted it down with the rest.

"Dr. Mott was here himself the other day to buy some rabbits," continued the dog merchant, brandishing his stick at the noisy crew who were trying to interrupt the flow of eloquence, "and I asked him had he ever seen a mad dog that didn't have something in his stomach what had no right to be there? 'Well, no,' he said; 'he never had, now that he came to think of it.'

"Says I: 'Doctor, there's lots of imagination what helps to kill your patients,' and says he: 'You're quite right, Young, there is.' And I told him he was free to come down here any time and inoculate me with virus from any of his rabbits or from his dogs either, and that showed pretty plain whether I believed there was such a thing as hydrophobia. He asked me whether I'd ever seen a man with hydrophobia, and said if I had I never would forget it.

"Well, now I'm not going to say that folks can't get blood-poisoning from the bite of a dog, because I know they can. Come here, Peter!" and he took up his little blind Yorkshire terrier that was running about the floor and opened his mouth. "Now you see that black stuff 'round the top of his teeth? Well, some dogs has that and some hasn't; it's what we call a foul or a canker mouth. Some is born with it. Well, if a dog bites you so as that gets into the bite, you're apt to have blood-poisoning unless you're careful with the wound, but if it's properly washed and cauterized there an't a bit of danger. For that matter, if you was to have a bite from a man whose teeth had tartar on them you'd run a great deal bigger risk. Dr. Mott said himself that he'd rather a dog would bite him than a man; it wasn't as dangerous.

"I knew a man whose dog bit him in the lip. The place was healing up and he hadn't thought anything of it just about a week after, some fool said to him: 'By jove! I'd hate to have that wound in my lip. You stand a good chance for hydrophobia.' Well the man got as white as a sheet and ten days after they tell me he had to be smothered in the hospital.

"Now, you can just say this in the paper," said the dog-dealer, finishing his lecture on hydrophobia, "that what will cure mad dogs or prevent 'em from going mad is to give them a handful of table salt whenever they look sick and droopy. That'll act as an emetic, and its simple and every one has it handy, and I'll guarantee no dog that has that every month or two to clean his stomach out is going to go mad. They collect so much stuff in their stomachs that if they don't live in the country and run all the time they needs an emetic every two months or so.

"And you might say, too," he concluded, "that when people wants to get rid of a dog it's kinder to kill it at once than loose it out, as folks do, and have it staring round wildly and rushing from place to place, as a lost frightened dog will, so that everybody says 'mad dog' and chases and stones it to death. It's that what starts all these mad-dog scares in the country, and you'd be astonished to know how many people turn their dogs out when one of them scares comes along and the papers gets to crying out about it."