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Saturday, January 21, 2023

With All the Rabies Around, It's Time to Shoot Dogs--With Rabies Vaccine or With Bullets, Says Dr. Frank McCallum, Jan. 20, 1923

Would Have Every Bow-Wow Safer Than Is Apt to Be Case Nowadays

In due time rural dog-catchers will be crooning their refrain, “Come little doggie, nice little pup,” over the countrysides of North Carolina is the will of certain local persons should develop into law. “There are too dog-gone many dogs; they are a menace to the human public,” is the opinion of Eugene Wood, coroner of Lenoir County. Wood recently suggested a law requiring immunization of canines against hydrophobia [rabies]. This step, he said, could be taken with comparatively little expense to the owner of an animal.

Reports had here today indicated that no less than 16 persons had been bitten by rabid dogs and cats in Lenoir County during the past few weeks. An outbreak of hydrophobia occurred a short distance south of here during the late fall. All the persons attacked resided in the lower part of the county. One dog suffering from the malady bit a number of persons. Rabid cats have attacked at least three persons, including two children of Benjamin Sullivan, residing a short distance from Kinston, a few days ago. Sullivan probably would “vote for” an anti-rabies statute. At another time in recent years three sons of his family were bitten by a dog with hydrophobia. Sullivan has expended a considerable sum for the Pasteur treatment.

Dr. Frank B. McCallum, local veterinaries, discovered that a single rabid dog running amuck in the outskirts of Kinston recently bit 10 other canines, one horse and one cow. Owners of the animals attacked had to kill them or expend money for treatment against the disease, as in the case of the horse and cow.

Thirty-five or 40 dogs owned by the Fox Chase Club here have been immunized. Wood, declaring it “cheap insurance,” would require every animal owned by a resident of this city and county to be “shot”—“either with serum or bullets.”

From the front page of The Kinston Free Press, Saturday, Jan. 20, 1923.

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