Recognized for their unique bond and their prodigious rat-killing ability, they became a fixture of city newspapers, were exempted from local ordinances and immortalized in cartoons.
San Francisco, in common with other cities at the time, had a problem with free-ranging dogs.
In Los Angeles in the 1840s dogs outnumbered people nearly two to one, and while the situation in San Francisco had not reached this extreme, the large numbers of strays and feral dogs did cause problems.
Dogs were regularly poisoned or trapped and killed. Nevertheless, if a dog turned out to be a good ratter or distinguished itself in some other way it was still possible for it to survive.
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