"less adoptable pet week" - dogs as true brothers, 1858

"Parsee" is an older term for practicioners of the Zoroastrian religion hailing from India. We've seen before how important is the dog to Zoroastrians, and here is another kindly proof of it from a Knickerbocker magazine article of 1858.

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My Parsee neighbor was an exalted humanitarian in a canine direction, regarding dogs as his friends and brothers, and piously according them (in undue proportion, on the score of justice to cats) a fellow-feeling that made him wondrous kind.
. . .When his operations on land and his ventures by sea, his Bombay brokerages and his Surat ship-yard, should have returned him a fair Parsee fortune, and established him on a financial footing with the princely traders of his tribe, it was his fond intention to found a hospital for the indigent sick of that great quadrupedal community, whereat halt dogs and dogs that were blind, mangy dogs and dogs stricken with confirmed asthma, dogs that had lost their tails by traps, their toes by coach-wheels, dogs whose minds had been impaired by affliction, as well as those whose bodies had suffered in fights — disabled dog-kind generally, whatever the nature or degree of its melancholy dispensation, should be free to the consolations of splints and bandages, soothing poultices and 'potecary's stuff, with wholesome bones in abundance, and the sweetest of straw beds.
So should my Parsee neighbor fulfil a particular injunction of Zoroaster, and make sure for his soul that it should be spoken for in the day when enfranchised Dog should speak for itself.

-- "My Parsi Neighbor," author unknown, The Knickerbocker (New York: 1858) vol. 52, p. 603.