Dogs

In Pittsburgh, Mrs. Celia Freedel's 7-month-old pup bit Mrs. Freedel and her daughter Miss Anna Freedel; also their neighbors, Mrs. Rebecca Labowitz and Mr. Charles Rice. That made Mrs. Freedel think the young dog was sick. So she took it to the Animal Rescue League, whose veterinarians diagnosed the ailment as dumb rabies, the variety in which the sick beast remains quiet and sullen until an overcurious human pokes at it. This dog died; the four rabies victims are receiving Pasteur treatment, and Pittsburgh has a "mad dog" scare.*

At English, Ind., frenzied neighbors killed "mad" dogs, then ruefully discovered that the dogs had been lapping at the English garbage pails. The pails contained the townsmen's weekly residue of moonshine mash, and the dogs had been only drunk.

At Leyelland, Tex., T. T. McDevitt's little buff prairie dog* sat on his rear stoop and scolded the children as they went to school. The children would stick their tongues out at him, for he was tame and scolded only because his mother and father, who were always running from rattlesnakes, taught him to. Last week he chased after the children, whistling all the while a shrill whine. This child's foot, that child's leg he nipped at. Then his jaws sagged open, his hind legs dragged a faint furrow in a Levelland street, in the final stiffening of rabies, given him by one of the town hounds or by some coyote bum. Four of the children he had bitten were rushed to Austin, for treatment.

At Northwestern University, Chicago, Dr. A. C. Ivy, Professor of physiology, cut the stomach out of a dog two years ago. Last week he commented: "Instead of gulping down his food, this dog eats slowly and the food is perfectly digested in the intestinal trac He appears to understand that he must masticate thoroughly and takes him 12 hours out of 24 for his meals. This test shows how patients who have had part of ther stomachs removed because of cancer should be fed."

At Rhodes Farm, Middlesex England, Sir Theodore Cook, chair man of the Field Distemper Committee stated tentatively that ; serum had been devised to cure dogs of distemper.

*During the past year manufacturers ol serums have been circularizing doctors and dog owners with descriptions of a serum to immunize dogs against rabies, such serums are injected into the dog and protect him in the same way as the proper serums protect humans against typhoid fever or smallpox. This was one of the means used to fight the recent rabies situation in Louisville, Ky. (TIME, Dec. 27). But useful as is the serum, the literature has been causing a mild hysteria about "mad dogs" across the country.

*Cynomys ludovicianus