About a year ago, I wrote an entry about the mid-nineteenth-century New York City custom of dog slaughter. The city offered fifty cents for every stray turned in, and the roundup seems to have struck everyone as a bit gruesome. The other day, while looking for a caricature of a divorce lawyer, I stumbled across this cartoon of protesting dogs in the 27 May 1852 issue of Joseph A. Scoville's humorous weekly The Pick, and I couldn't resist printing it out from the microfilm. (Alas, the divorce lawyer's caricature must have been in an issue that wasn't microfilmed. According to a 1930s-era bibliography, two libraries in the world then had paper versions of The Pick for 1852, so there's a chance that the caricature I was looking for---and an unscratched version of this one, for that matter---still survives.)
The "Porter" in the caption must have been William T. Porter, editor of the sporting and humor magazine The Spirit of the Times, who presumably took the dog-friendly position on the issue.
