Housewives' Tale

In small, woodsy Belmont, Calif., few miles south of San Francisco, two chatty housewives named Mrs. Mary Morrison and Mrs. Mary Lauersen marched one day last month to the chief of police with a horrid tale. While burning leaves in her front yard, Mrs. Morrison had seen a man with a paper bag dart from behind a barn across the street where racing greyhounds were kenneled, dodge around suspiciously, then toss the bag in some bushes. Soon as he was out of sight, Mrs. Morrison retrieved the bag, took it to Mrs. Lauersen's to open. Inside they found two dead cats, still warm, with their legs broken, their claws torn off.

Triumphantly Mrs. Morrison and Mrs. Lauersen, who hated the hounds' stink and yapping, declared that it was just what they had suspected all along. The kennel men. said they, were catching cats, tearing their claws off to keep them from scratching, throwing them to the dogs. Purpose was to give the dogs a taste for blood, make them chase mechanical rabbits with zest.

Touchy about their training methods, dog racers strenuously deny that any cruelty is involved. But that a hound's interest in the mechanical lure has to be kept up by an occasional chase after live quarry is a belief generally held by the sporting world. Newspapers in & around San Francisco picked up the Belmont housewives' tale, played it big. People said that the Belmont kennel men had been paying children to catch cats, had been trying to buy cats from the local meat market. The kennel men insisted they had never trained their hounds on cats. The police chief dug up the housewives' cats, found their claws intact. Snorted Mrs. Morrison: "They've switched cats on us."

Last week the ruckus ended in a Belmont City Council meeting. Finessing the main issue, the councilmen solemnly voted to banish the kennels as a public nuisance.

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