Animals: At Loch Ness

Dead Cats

If one dead cat is a problem, 213,835 might be considered a crisis. Yet last year New York City's Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals without much ado disposed of that number in addition to 53,925 stray dogs and 1,858 miscellaneous horses, chickens, rabbits, pigeons.

The Society puts animals to death with lethal gas. Private truckers under contract to the city's Sanitation Department call daily to collect carcasses, roll them out to Barren Island. There skinners pounce on horses and mules, cats with good fur. Horse hides make shoes, baseballs; cat hides which once became ladies' neckpieces, now vanish darkly into the Orient. Skinned carcasses are dumped in a big "digester," steamed to draw out fat. This is used for rough lubricating grease. Defatted remains are dried, ground up for fertilizer. Concessionaires pocket the profit.

Among its disciplinary measures of the year the Society reported arrests of two people for throwing live cats into furnaces, one for strapping a turkey to roller skates (TIME, Dec. 18), two for biting the heads off live rats.