Edward Koch, the famously colorful former New York mayor, visiting here for the University of Illinois at Chicago symposium on the late Mayor Richard J. Daley, told the gathered dignitaries of a battle he once tried to wage on graffiti in his city.
Aware that rail cars were vandalized in overnight raids, he called in a local public transit official and suggested that security dogs be used in storage yards.
“Dogs might bite somebody,” the official responded, according to a still-astonished Koch.
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“I said, `What? I thought that was what they were supposed to do.'”
So Koch, tongue in cheek, said he told the man to use wolves instead, because they never bite “unless they are rabid.”
But it didn’t end there.
After researching the issue, an intrepid New York Times reporter later informed Koch that wild wolves may not bite, but domesticated ones do. To which Koch replied that he would use only wild members of the species and, once they became accustomed to their big-city surroundings, would replace them with cousins fresh from the woods.