Denver, Rabies, and the Politics of Dogs
Introduction
In 1955, the American Journal of Public Health published an article by Robert K. Anderson and J. Robert Cameron of Denver’s Department of Health and Hospitals. In “Registration Without Taxation -- Denver’s Approach to Rabies Control,” Anderson and Cameron described the program established after a 1950 rabies epizootic where the city dispensed with dog licenses and required only a valid annual vaccination tag. Owners had their dogs vaccinated in a veterinarian’s office. The veterinarian provided a shot, a tag, and registered owner and animal with the Department of Health and Hospitals. The department’s registry identified dog and owner in cases of loss or impound. Vaccination and registration were accomplished in one visit and eliminated the widely defied and little-enforced dog license. Compliance continued after initial enthusiasm, Anderson and Cameron observed. It showed little prospect of waning. Denver’s rabies program, as they described it, was a triumph of responsive government, political leadership, and an active, informed citizenry.In fact, Denver’s postwar years introduced routine rabies vaccination and saw repeated efforts to reshape dog control that vexed politicians and animated citizens for almost a decade, and changed the city for humans and dogs alike. Neither the history of rabies nor the history of urban dog control has received the attention either deserves. What literature we have on rabies addresses the period before and immediately after the advent of a vaccine in 1885, and neglects rabies in twentieth-century urban American life. Consequently, we do not understand how rabies vaccination became a commonplace, or how the mad dog, a once-feared feature of urban life, was banished from American cities in the decade after World War II’s end. Nor do we understand how rabies came to be a disease known, acknowledged, but sufficiently remote in our experiences and imagination that today’s attitudes about vaccination, wildlife, and urban animals fairly invite rabies outbreaks in American cities.
Likewise, despite the animal turn and its scholarship, we have a limited account of how the lives of humans and those of our most durable others, dogs, took shape in our cities. As Jon T. Coleman has observed, “Dogs are everywhere, yet few Americans, and fewer American historians, ponder their ubiquity.” We have even less study of dog control than rabies, and what has been offered concerns how urban dog control reveals the tangled history of public and private spheres. The postwar politics of dogs mobilized Denver’s citizens and harried its civic leaders and other public figures. With the politics of dogs, the stakes were thought no less than individual rights and community safety and order, moral development, the future of city and nation, the measure of humanity, and the fate of a beloved and reviled animal, all occasioned by the deep, passionate bond between humans and dogs in a modern American city.
Rabies occasioned Denver’s postwar dog control efforts and structured its policy for years to come. While Anderson, Cameron, and the Denver Department of Health and Hospitals equated dog control with rabies, Denver citizens set rabies aside as a concern. As soon as dog control was raised during the 1950 rabies epizootic, it became an issue apart from the disease. Vaccination, a tool in the fight against rabies only after the public made plain its support, removed a dread disease from city and consciousness, and never returned to public debate. Denver’s dog politics turned on the nature of dogs and quality of life, and evoked relationships of owners and pets, humans and animals, family, neighborhood, and community, and saw mayoral missteps, stormy city council meetings, controversial ordinances, and a leash-law referendum and litigation through to the Colorado Supreme Court. Denver politicians underestimated the passion dogs elicited, the desire to protect pets, and support for dog control and a leash law enforced where and when necessary. They fumbled, learned, and responded with innovation and adroit political maneuver, often following where the public led them. And where dogs had no voice in the debate, politicians, the media, and citizens anthropomorphized them into participants in photographs and political cartoons, or brought them to protests, city council meetings, and court.
