Dogdom's Dachau

It was the kind of story to tear hearts--and sell newspapers. In Hempstead, L.I. last week, Harold Sheridan's dog was missing. After hunting in vain for his own pet at the pound, Sheridan offered to give another six-month-old puppy a home. Dogcatcher Jacob Roeper refused; he was going to put the dog to death by gas, and said that the law backed him up. Reader Sheridan asked for help from Long Island's lively tabloid Newsday, published by Alicia Patterson Guggenheim, daughter of the late Joseph Medill Patterson of the New York Daily News (TIME, Nov. 1, 1948).

City Editor Jack Altshul told Sheridan that all he needed to claim a dog was a license and a redemption certificate. Thus armed, Sheridan hurried back to the pound. Said Roeper: Sorry, the dog is dead. Altshul, who knows that dogs run second only to babies as human-interest stories, sent a reporter down to the pound. What he turned up shocked Newsday's 116,000 readers. Dogcatcher Roeper, Newsday reported, gets paid $2 for each dog he catches and $2 more for each one he kills. With this piecework incentive, Roeper had killed 4,158 dogs in Hempstead township (96.8% of those he has caught), and earned more than $16,000 in twelve months.

Scores of Long Islanders flooded the Newsday switchboard with telephone calls to do something about what Newsday called "dogdom's Dachau." At week's end, a citizens' committee had formed, and 100 anti-Roeper petitions were circulating.

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