The Biograph catalog summarized this film as follows: “Dogs and cats are fed in at one end of the machine, and come out at the other as linked sausages. One of the most laughable scenes in the list.”
       The U.S. Library of Congress catalog gives the following description: “The subject of this comedy is a mechanical contrivance that converts dogs into sausages. As the film begins, one sees a set with a sign in large letters reading ‘Sausage Factory.’ A machine with belts, wheels, entrance apertures and exit pipes, with a sign on it ‘Sausage Machine,’ is between the back of the set and the camera. The action of the film shows derby hatted sausage manufacturers transforming little dogs into sausages by putting them into one side of the machine and taking the sausages out of the other. See also Dog Factory [1904] and Fun in a Butcher Shop [1901]. The Mutoscope was used as an illustration in Magic, by Albert E. Hopkins, first copyrighted in 1897.”
       This film was shot at American Mutoscope's rooftop studio at 841 Broadway in New York City.
       See also companion films both named Sausage Machine (1897). All three films were based on a vaudeville routine about “Catchem and Stuffem's Sausage Factory.”
       The film was used as an illustration of trick photography in Albert A. Hopkins's Magic; Stage Illusions and Scientific Diversions Including Trick Photography (New York, 1897).
       The American Mutoscope Company was co-founded in Dec 1895 by former Edison Manufacturing Company inventor William K. L. Dickson (who left Edison in Apr of that year), fellow inventors Herman Casler and Harry Marvin, and businessman Elias Koopman. Their Mutoscope, which originally made flip-card peep show movies, soon rivaled Thomas Edison’s Kinetoscope (see Edison Kinetoscopic Records for 1893). In the summer of 1896, when Edison introduced the Vitascope 35mm projector, American Mutoscope immediately came out with its own 68mm projector that offered a superior image. In 1899, the company changed its name to the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company, then shortened it nine years later to the Biograph Company.