IT SHOULDN'T HAPPEN TO A DOG
Mayer, Miton
It Shouldn't Happen To A Dog By MILTON MAYER ISUPPOSE that almost anything can happen almost anywhere, but for some reason it always seems to happen in Chicago. This time it's a campaign by the...
...He is a man of principle, though his principles are bad, and if it occurred to him that fascism was wrong, which it probably won't, he would fight it...
...I am not only against the killing of dogs...
...When I think that my old employer, Mr...
...But the anti-vivisection argument is the silliest sentimentality I know of...
...But the tearful account of the torture of pets by such butchers as Prof...
...The dog lovers are baying at the City Council, three of whose members used to have a piece of an illegal dog track, and the Council is deliberating a city ordinance whose end purpose is to stop vivisection, or the use of live animals for experimental purposes in medicine...
...Hearst, is not, however, concerned with right and wrong and has never had any principles at all...
...His orders, from Berchtesgaden or San Simeon, always read the same: Get a pogrom started, whip up a frenzy, fake a national crisis, cook up a series of atrocities, and drive the dummkopfs wild...
...But for every Hearst who has profited by vivisection (and by anti-vivisection campaigns), there are thousands of wounded soldiers whose lives have been saved by experimentally discovered plasma and sulfas, and millions of ordinary honest citizens who would have been carried off by accident or disease if it hadn't been for the butchery practised by men like Carlson...
...Hysterical emotionalism is the basis of fascism, and Hearst, who openly was pro-Nazi until it began to cost him money, is a master fascist...
...And why should he and I fight when we both need to conserve our failing strength for the struggle to save the world from Hearst...
...Dogs are delightful beasts, but they are beasts none the less...
...I do not worship either science or scientists, and in my low moments I sometimes think that modern medicine has merely enabled us to live worse than our ancestors and get away with it...
...He has no other interest in the world than money and has never done anything for dog or man...
...That's how soft I am...
...The hat was dropped, on this occasion, by my old employer, Mr...
...This time it's a campaign by the local dog lovers to put an end to medical science...
...I have even saved a few from the fate worse than death, by cultivating the acquaintance of Harry, the animal man at the University of Chicago Medical School, and making off with an occasional prize specimen...
...I was working for Hearst at the time, and the night the returns came in I resigned, as I did not want the Communists to catch me working for Hearst...
...I should think that my friend Harry Elmer Barnes, who denies that dogs and men are different in kind, and insists that they are different only in degree, would have a hard time maintaining that dogs, or, for that matter, bedbugs, should be killed for the sake of man...
...The Hearst, or master fascist, technique is to whip up the public into a hydrophobic state and then anesthetize them and go through their pockets before they come to...
...A. J. Carlson, president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, is good for a few thousand extra copies of the Herald-American...
...Drive 'em Wild My old employer, Mr...
...I am even against the killing of men...
...The Greater Struggle The last one I saved from the butcher Carlson was a large hearthrug style of dog named Boy...
...I am emotional almost to the point of hysteria myself...
...But as sure as I call Harry an anti-vivisectionist, he will call me an anti-evolutionist...
...1, but Bob was wrong...
...Whether the whipping boy is science, academic freedom, the Yellow Peril, the New Deal, or the Jews doesn't much matter to the master fascist...
...ruined her coat, dress, and complexion...
...William Randolph Hearst...
...By what right, if we are beasts, do we kill our fellow-beasts...
...Our four-footed friend is, of course, a sure thing for a little extra circulation...
...Every great technique for healing living man is the result of the butchery, as Hearst calls it, practiced on living guinea pigs, mice, dogs, or monkeys...
...Some of my best friends are dogs...
...McCormick of the Tribune—why does the Tribune have to happen in Chicago, by the way ?—follows the dictates of his own hysterical emotionalism and cannot be bought for money...
...Not I, for one...
...One day he left home in a playful mood, and the next thing I knew I was being sued by a woman who claimed that Boy, in an effort to rub noses with her Pekinese, which she was carrying in her arms, had scratched, clawed, mauled, and terrified her...
...I settled for $50 and, though my affection for Boy was running low at the moment, I restrained myself from turning him over to the butcher Carlson and committed him, with a letter of recommendation, into the hands of a farmer...
...By way of illustration, I often recall with dismay the Presidential election of 1936...
...Boy, in spite of his wheelbase, was every now and again, full of uric acid and vinegar...
...The dog lovers will get up on their hind legs and howl about vivisection at the drop of a hat...
...Hearst wrote an editorial hailing Roosevelt as a second Andrew Jackson...
...Who among us is so callous as to be unmoved by the play-by-play account of the dismemberment of a helpless, innocent, faithful dog, invariably named Tricks...
...In my time I have owned no end of beasts, invariably of the mixed, or combination, breed...
...In starting this campaign through his local rag, the Herald-American, my old employer is, as usual, using the sob appeal to sell newspapers...
...But the following day, when it was too late for me to get my job back, Mr...
...This vicious old goat was once referred to, by Robert Morss Lovett, as Public Enemy No...
...Hearst is Nos...
...We think with our blood," Hitler's official philosopher has written...
...The Basis Of Fascism The dog lovers, who aren't dog lovers at all but hysterical emotionalists, have been having a field day, but when it is all over, they will find that their total effect has been to raise the per-line cost of advertising in the Hearst papers...
...The anti-vivisection issue raises the interesting question of the compai-ative worth of the lives of dogs and men...
...and caused her pain and anguish...
...1 through 6, all by himself...
...Hearst, is now 83 or so, and has been kept alive by the use of medicines discovered as a result of animal experimentation, I am tempted to be an anti-vivisectionist myself...
...The day before the election, Hearst announced that if Roosevelt were elected the Communists would seize the country...
Vol. 8 • September 1944 • No. 37
