Gary Larson’s iconic comic strip The Far Side regularly featured a wide assortment of surprisingly intelligent animals, including snakes, bears, apes, cats, anteaters, and of course, cows — although Larson’s joke about their confounding tools didn’t go over so well.

But before Larson was world famous for drawing animals, he made a living trying to help them. Back in the 1970s, the early incarnation of the comic strip that would eventually become The Far Side was known as Nature’s Way. Possibly because that title made the comic sound like a homeopathic laxative, Larson didn’t make a whole lot of money, just three bucks per cartoon. So, while living in Seattle, he got a day job working as an animal cruelty investigator for the Humane Society.

“It’s something I just fell into,” Larson said of his Humane Society job in a 1983 interview. “It paid the rent.