Kindness to Animals
Miss Castle also conducted a guerilla war against medical researchers over their legal duty, under the general anti-cruelty statute, to provide adequate food, water, and shelter for animals confined in the animal laboratories. Still remembered is the day in June 1945, at the animal laboratory of Northwestern University Medical School, when Irene Castle, in tears, lifted the shivering, skin-and-bones body of a toy brown collie from its recently hosed-down cage and started off with a group of supporters to show it to the newspaper photograp_hers and Dr. Herman N. Bundesen, health commissioner of Chicago. Refused elevator service, she carried the dog in her arms down fourteen flights of stairs. Waiting at the street level was Dr. Andrew Conway Ivy, head of the Division of Physiology and Pharmacology at Northwestern University Medical School, and a pos5e of doctors, determined to head Miss Castle and her supporters off at the pass. A fracas followed in which the women suffered bruises and torn apparel, Dr. Ivy succeeded in wrenching the collie from Irene's embrace, and Northwestern became the defendant in a lawsuit. Irene Castle was probably Chicago's outstanding animal defender of this century. At her death in r 969, it was recalled that she had directed: "When I die my gravestone is to say 'humanitarian' instead of 'dance.r.' " Technology and social change have given the SPCA's, refuges, and animal shelters a different set of problems. The draft horse and its problems are gone. But we have an unprecedented boom in ownership of pets and increased human permissiveness toward animal reproduction. No one really knows how many abandoned or stray animals there are in Chicago. Estimates of the number of waifs that are picked up and destroyed by the Animal Care Pound, an agency of the Chicago Police Department, plus the private societies, range from two hundred thousand to two hundred and fifty thousand. This excludes the unknown number of small animals that are killed privately or the twelve thousand or so that are picked up dead on the streets, victims of autos 158
Chicago History
and trucks. There is a public¡ health factor in all this. And the cost, in money, is between one and two million dollars annually. The moral damage is incalculable: societies that stand for the ethical view that animals have a right to freedom from fear, from unnecessary pain, and to a decent death, are swamped by the surplus animal population and become, in effect, animal Buchenwalds. There are other and more fortunate animals, the domestic pets of the United States, estimated to number between fifty and fifty-seven millionincluding such exotic beasts as monkeys and ocelets, whose keeping the humane society activists greatly discourage. For cherished animals, the booming pet industry now provides goods, services, and accessories which cost slightly more than the gross national product of Ghana. One person's loving sentiment can be to another, of course, far-out sentimentality-there are dog perfumes such as Le Chien No. 5 and elaborate burial procedures for pet animals. At Paw Print Gardens, a West Chicago animal cemetery, the proprietors provide a chapel, the tolling of chimes, "reminiscing benches," and a short prayer (if desired) , just before the lowering of the casket. Then there is the matter of inheritances and trust funds. When Chicagoan Margaret Montgomery died some twenty-five years ago, she left a snug $15,000 for the support of her five cats, and named one William Fields as cat-ward and residuary legatee. One of the cats, Flat Nose, lived on for nine years, dining upon delicacies such as pot roast. It was saluted, at the ripe old age of twenty, by United Press International as "the richest cat in Chicago." Fields took Flat Nose's passing stoically: he survived and inherited. A stronger reaction was expressed by the chauffeur of a wealthy Chicago widow a few years ago. H e was left a generous allowance for the care of her dog. After the animal died and was buried at the Hinsdale Animal Cemetery, the chauffeur, far from grieving over the loss of the pet or the money he was paid to take care of it, remarked with relief: "I'm glad to see the last of that damn dog."