Cats And Other Animals

They fight like cat and dog ….." Everybody knows the expression, which must have been invented by someone who knew nothing of cats. If ever there was an untrue saying this is it. Though, of course, we all know of unpleasant people who think it amusing to encourage their dog, usually a big, fierce one, to chase cats, prove the saying to be nonsense: in Europe more than half the people who keep dogs keep a cat too.

And the two animals get on wonderfully. If a cat does not feel threatened it can prove the best of companions for the most unlikely of animals, and there are innumerable cases of cats befriending creatures which it would have absolutely no intercourse with in the normal course of events. Horses, in particular, accept a feline companion and sometimes seek one out.

Racegoers know the famous story of the thoroughbred who would never go to the course without his magnificent black tomcat friend. The cat, seated on the horse's rump, would patiently wait for the races to finish and then go back to the stable which he shared with his friend. There is a moving story of a chick whose mother had been killed by a car soon after its birth and which was adopted by a Danish cat called Pully.

Pully picked the chick up carefully in her mouth and took it to her own straw bed. An exemplary mother, the cat helped the chick to find food, protected it from the other hens when the farmer's wife strewed grain for them, and held it between her paws while it slept. When the chick grew up it integrated with the other hens but never forgot who had cared for it, and the cat and the hen could be seen walking around together, the cat quite calmly and the chicken preening itself. On another farm a female cat called Fandora happily suckled both Prissy, her own kitten, and Figaro, a fox cub which the farmer had found abandoned.