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Dogs and the Salem Witch Trials

The 17th-century event claimed at least 25 human lives. Whether any dogs were killed is unclear—but accusations against them had a familiar theme.

Perhaps the most famous example of such belief is the case of a poodle named Boy who belonged to Prince Rupert, an English-German cavalry commander on the Royalist side during the English Civil War. According to local historical researcher Marilynne K. Roach’s 2002 book, “ The Salem Witch Trials: A Day-by-day Chronicle of a Community Under Siege,” some of the afflicted girls claimed that a man named John Bradstreet had bewitched a dog. Nearly every history of Salem recounts how when Samuel Parris’s daughters were having terrible fits that led people to believe they were bewitched, Tituba, the enslaved woman who lived in the household, baked a “ witch cake ” using urine from the afflicted girls and fed it to the family’s dog.

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