Explanatory note Cat (one of four we have had over the years), who had made himself comfortable on the back of an uncomfortably seated young visitor, was annoyed i.e.glared then went out in a huff when he was required to move. 'The cat who walks by himself' (One of Kipling's Just So Stories). Conversations about either dogs or cats veer at times onto comparisons between them which are apt be unfavourable to cats, describing them as self-centred and unsociable. I'd always viewed them as self-contained with a need for some company and assumed the difference in sociability between dogs and cats was that cats, unlike dogs, are by nature solitary hunters. Beware of the cat? You might believe that cats are too self-centred to bother themselves with defending their owners but I'd always felt that cats pick up human emotions as well as dogs. I wish I'd kept the newspaper cutting from years ago of an elderly postmistress held up at gunpoint by a man who was sent packing by her cat which leapt up from the floor and sank its claws into his face. Instead here is the link to Californian news report of a cat which drove off a dog which had bitten its owners' four-year-old boy after knocking him off his bike:
www.animalwised.com/can-cats-protect-their-owners-2645.html And, in the letters section of SAGA magazine December 2000, a reader, V A Henderson, wrote of her cat placing gifts on her seriously ill daughter's bed of flower heads from the garden which it had broken off for her. Caring, compassionate cats.
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AuthorIt's almost two years since I published In Our Fathers' Footsteps (see under BOOKS). My latest book, One Dog and His Cop, about my cousin's police dog,was published 30 November this year (see under BOOKS). Archives
September 2021
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