Dogs are so numerous in New York, indeed, that they have already become a nuisance," the journalist Charles Dawson Shanly wrote in The Atlantic in 1872. He was annoyed by "all the barking ... and there is a good deal of it." Other New Yorkers feared that the dogs roaming the streets were "deleterious to health..." Anxieties escalated to the point that "weakminded people began to look upon Ponto's kennel in the back yard as a very Pandora's box of maladies too numerous and appalling to be contemplated without terror.