184 EVERYTHING ABOUT DOGS. 



excellent opportunities for its spread as well as being an insult to decency. It is 

 the duty of men who keep dogs to have some knowledge of their nature, and the 

 law should punish the ignorance or carelessness that causes an offense and a danger 

 to the public. 



"Unfortunately no cures are yet known ; such things as the Birling and Webb's 

 cures, and other pretended family secrets may be swept aside. Medical men have 

 tried every conceivable drug, and a few years ago it was thought that a specific 

 had been found in curari, but it proved delusive. Hot and vapor baths have their 

 votaries, just as half drowning in Hogg's Crib, a pool in the Severn, was at one 

 time believed in. 



"Preventive measures are alone to be relied on, and the very old one of the 

 Greeks, sucking the part, is excellent, and a small instrument has been invented 

 which can be easily used; it is like an old-fashioned breast exhauster, with the 

 bell-shaped head and long tube, but with a round bell half way up the tube as well, 

 which of course receives all that the operator sucks out of the wound and renders 

 him quite free from danger. It is made by a chemist in York, and can be bought 

 through Maw. Son & Company, Aldergate street, London." 



Here is a sensible article on hydrophobia published in Mans' Best Friend, being 

 an interview with John P. Haines, of New York City, the President of the 

 American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, a man who has had 

 considerable experience: 



"Hydrophobia is one of the rarest of diseases, and it is the height of folly to 

 imagine that every dog that happens to suffer intensely from the heat is either 

 mad or in danger of going mad. A mad policeman is every bit as dangerous as a 

 mad dog, and probably in the past quite as many of the former as of the latter 

 have been mad." 



"Mr. Haines quotes from high authoritieis when he says that in ninety-nine 

 cases out of a hundred the poor brute which is destroyed while supposedly in the 

 throes of rabies is merely suffering from excitement which will cure itself, and 

 that a person bitten by an animal under such circumstances is absolutely in no 

 danger of serious results unless he permits himself to become a victim of his own 

 disordered imagination. Mr. Haines iis himself authority for the statement that the 

 cases of death from hydrophobia reported from time to time are wrongly diag 

 nosed, and that, as a rule, they result simply from worry. The weather has nothing 

 to do with the case, although no doubt dogs are less liable to sickness in cold 

 weather than during the hot spell, a istate of affairs due perhaps almost as much to 

 the thoughtlessness or ignorance of their owners as to the weather conditions. 



"A dog that has been properly fed and is being' so fed, will suffer much less 

 discomfort than another which has been stuffed with food calculated to hea't the 

 blood, and such a dog is, and especially when not overweight, far more liable to 

 escape illness than the fat, badly-conditioned animal that is quite "above himself," 

 and ready to go wrong at any time. 



"What are the dog days? They are the heated term in July and August, during 

 which dogs are supposed to be peculiarly liable to rabies, or canine madness. That 

 is one answer, but there is a better. There are no dog days, because there is no 

 time of the year when dogs are especially liable to rabies. There are no more cases 

 of rabies in July and August than in December and January. Moreover, rabies is 

 one of the rarest of canine diseases. When you hear a cry of 'Mad Dog!' the 

 chancea are many thousands to one that the dog is not mad. When you read in 

 the papers of someone being bitten by a mad dog the chances are thousands to one 



