Some background on this comic:

Transcript:

The Los Angeles Times, which carries The Far Side, has taken umbrage with my cartoon on several occasions. (Apparently, someone there actually reads the comics beforehand.) These three, as I recall, created some conflicts with the “good taste” standards of that paper, and I believe all three were deleted from their comic page back in the early eighties.

The first two I suppose are subjective, although I don’t remember other papers censoring them. Their rejection of the elephant cartoon, however, had me baffled. I’ve always found it appalling that the demand for ivory has caused these magnificent animals to be continuously poached—but the ultimate act of contempt for the rights of wildlife has got to be represented by the elephant’s foot wastebasket. And that’s the point I was striving for in this cartoon—not that I was hoping to make a profound comment of any sort (the cartoon is really pretty inane, I think), but just who wouldn’t be upset to find out something like this had been done to a former part of their anatomy?