Hot Time in the Old Town - Edward Kohn [40]
Finding a bank door open, Jerry approached the attendant at the entrance, who aimed a kick at the dog. In a foul mood, Jerry snapped at the foot, which raised the cry from someone inside, “Look out, Mac! He may be mad!” This set off a panic inside the crowded bank, attracting the attention of Officer Giblin, who was “big and a great pistol shot.”
“Kill the beast!” the crowd cried to Giblin. Not wanting to take too rash an action, the officer first studied the dog to see if it was really mad. The examination consisted of prodding the dog with his nightstick. Of course, poor little Jerry snapped at the club as he had the attendant’s foot. “That was enough for Giblin,” the Herald reported dryly. “The dog was mad, of course. It had resented his effort to ascertain the condition of its nerves, and necessarily the animal was a menace to the community.” Giblin removed his pistol and readied to fire, at which point a clerk shouted, “Don’t shoot him in here!” Giblin shooed the dog outside, put the revolver to the dog’s head, and fired. “The little black dog rolled over and died,” Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World reported. “The crowd cheered. Policeman Giblin walked nonchalantly off.”
This was not the end of Jerry the Tramp’s undignified tale, however. Apparently the dog had run across the line between the beat of Giblin and that of fellow officer George Lewis from another station house. Having heard the shot, Officer Lewis rushed toward the scene and found the dead dog lying in the gutter. Without hesitation Lewis took out his own gun and also fired into the dog’s head. “The dog was just as dead after Policeman Lewis shot it as it was before,” one observer noted. But now Lewis, too, could return to his station house and report that he had dispatched a mad dog. “On the blotters at their stations and on the slips at Police Headquarters both Policeman Giblin and Policeman Lewis are given credit for having ‘shot a mad dog at No. 261 Broadway.’ Both are ready to swear that they did it.”
Such an episode may have reminded New Yorkers of a new board game that had appeared in the city that very year. In Rival Policemen: A New Comic Game, players representing rival police precincts competed to capture the greatest number of crooks, moving lead police playing pieces over a grid representing city streets. In the game, though, no points were given for shooting mad dogs.
In fact Thursday, August 6, was a bad day for dogs in the city, as the cry “Mad dog!” was heard all over town. Policemen on this day shot another five dogs at 16th Street, 138th Street, 35th Street, Lexington Avenue, and 42nd Street. All the dogs were officially designated “mad,” although they were probably just suffering through the early stages of heat exhaustion. For dogs the early symptoms include heavy panting, confusion, and heavy salivating, which might appear to be foaming at the mouth. During the heat wave countless dogs suffered these symptoms, with the unfortunate ones labeled “mad” and killed in the street by police officers.
Horses also suffered greatly during the heat wave. New Yorkers were utterly dependent on the tens of thousands of horses that plied the streets of Manhattan, drawing carriages, transporting goods, and pulling the passenger cars of the several aboveground railways. While the final human death toll from the heat would number around 1,300, the heat wave also took the lives of thousands of horses. One paper described the treatment of sunstroke in horses: “A pail of water dashed over the head, a couple of kicks to see how much life was really left in them—this was about the best the sunstruck horse got. And then a bullet put him out of his misery.”
On a normal day perhaps two hundred horses might die. Their carcasses were routinely left on the street until removed by the city. During the heat wave, almost every street had a horse carcass rotting in the heat, and the city was unable to cart away the massive number of dead horses.
“THE THERMOMETER TODAY is said to be well up in the nineties,