I was combing through the earliest issues of Mind, the preeminent philosophy journal in the UK, when I found this odd note by Henry Maudsley called 'Alleged Suicide of a Dog'. The opening paragraph contains this gruesome bit:
One Journal believes there is a well- authenticated story of a cat which, having had its kittens drowned was so grief-stricken at its bereavement that it deliberately committed suicide by strangling itself in the fork of the branch of a tree. The writer's experience of life in the country cannot have been very great, or he would have heard of other instances in which cats running up trees after birds had slipped and, being caught in a forked branch, had been strangled. Had he extended his inquiries he might even have become acquainted with instances in which the same fate had overtaken human beings. --Henry Maudsley, Mind, 4 (1879): 410-413.
