In reality, the dog did kill itself during the filming of this short, but accidentally. However the studio was able to keep it quiet and manage to keep a small pack of look-a-likes on hand.
We have a projector and I like to screen old silent films... Unfortunately I have a serious problem with the horrible MIDI piano soundtracks that blanket these things. For one thing, all kinds of music was played during silent movies by live bands, it wasn't necessarily a guy hammering away at a piano or organ by himself.
Sometimes you can put your own music on and it works, but sometimes it clearly changes the emotional content of what the movie is doing.
I wish some billionaire would hire a bunch of orchestras and bands to curate soundtracks for every old movie individually so that cinephiles wouldn't be submitted to this kind of torture. That would be a great service to humanity.
There's an eccentric dude in Toronto who screens movies in his house, he's some kind of legend. He has done his own scores: http://reghartt.ca/cineforum/?p=9866