DOG BURIED IN CHURCH YARD.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XXXVI, Issue 1254, 4 June 1914, Page 4

DOG BURIED IN CHURCH YARD.

Because a dog was interred alongside human bodies in consecrated ground, some church people in South London are wondering whether rh : graveyaid should be reconsecrated. Th-' dog was a notoricus’v ferocious animal —a brown chow, in appearance like a wolf. He bad killed several d'gs and cats in his time, and was consequently a source o c r r u : xpense to his master. Many attempts had been made to capture nlm iu order to dose hbn with poison md recently be was towed at tl end of n rope and taken to St. Paul's Churchyard, Clapham, even when captive, however, E was not possible to approach him, but, as if by the intervention c f Providence, he got entangled in the railings. A surgeon’s knife was obtained quickly from a public mortuary near by, and the dor? was killed. His master and another man then buried him, and thought they would be troubled no more by the dog. But when the execution and burial were in progress, an unit iendly spy took stock of it from his garden, and reported the incident to the police. Two days later an inspector of the Royal Society ;’or the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals exhumed the body for the purpose of making a report. “If the dog was killed humanely,” said a bishop, commenting on the affair, “the incident is at an end. It is not nice to think of dogs and human beings buried together, but a solitary incident of this kind, although objectionable, cannot amount to desecration in the ecclesiastical sense.”