Starved Dogs

One night last week, as his car reached the end of its run, a San Francisco cable-car conductor heard the muffled howling of dogs. Next he investigated, traced the noise to an abandoned night club. He notified the San Francisco S. P. C. A. When Officer Al Girolo broke in, he found 34 feebly whimpering dogs chained to the silver-&-gold walls inside. Obviously near death from starvation, the dogs were rotting bags of bones, their teeth and gums infected, their bodies covered with shiny spots where their hair had fallen out. Two of the dogs were dead. Seven of them were eating a weaker one alive. The two dead dogs had been almost devoured.

The dogs' owner had rented the house under the name of "Everall." Arrested, she and her husband now called themselves "Mr. & Mrs. David Brown." "I did the best I could," wept Mrs. Brown. ". . . We fed them every week or so." Their lawyer said later they were really David and Eleanor Goldshur: he a philosophy instructor at San Francisco Junior College, she a student of psychology. Mr. Goldshur disclaimed any knowledge of the dogs' plight; Mrs. Goldshur explained that she was interested in "animal mass behaviorism.'' Officer Girolo said that dogs have to be "damned hungry" before they resort to cannibalism.

The Goldshurs' lawyer pleaded: "For many years Mrs. Goldshur has been preparing a thesis for a master's degree in psychology. . . . She has become so interested and so involved in this study that she has developed an abnormal frame of mind, bordering on insanity." The judge sentenced the Goldshurs to six months apiece in the county jail, placed them on probation for four of the six months. All the dogs had to be destroyed.

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