Another excerpt from my unpublished, and untitled, book for young and general readers
The English novelist Thomas Hardy so loved his pet cat that he buried it beneath its favourite tree and penned these lines: “Never another pet for me! Let your place all vacant be!”
Hardy kept his word until, in his declining years, someone gave him a gray Persian called Cobby. The cat disappeared after the author’s death in 1928, and writer Frank Smyth has recently come up with a plausible, if grisly, reason why.
He claims that Cobby ate Hardy’s heart, which had been taken from his body for burial in a Dorchester village graveyard (the rest of his body was interred in Westminster Abbey). When the undertaker discovered what had happened, he killed the cat and its body was placed in a box and buried instead.
The American writer Ernest Hemingway is said to have had 30 cats during his lifetime and, according to some reports, a particular fascination for a six-toed Cuban variety.
British war-time prime minister Winston Churchill is said to have had a cat that attended Cabinet meetings – but he is also quoted as saying: “I like pigs. Dogs look up to us. Cats look down on us. Pigs treat us as equals.”
That’s just the beginning. Isaac Newton, the 17th Century philosopher and scientist who discovered the law of gravity is widely credited with inventing the cat flap for his felines’ convenience, while the astrologer and seer Nostradamus apparently owned a cat called Grimalkin.
There have been many cats in the White House, beginning with Tabby, who belonged to Abraham Lincoln’s son. The great humanitarians Albert Schweitzer and Florence Nightingale (who hat pets called Disraeli and Bismarck), French artists Auguste Renoir and Claude Monet, Pope Leo XII, the Roman poet Petrarch, and writers Victor Hugo, Walter Scott, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Charles Dickens, Alexander Dumas, Lewis Carroll, Mark Twain, Beatrix Potter, Edward (The Owl and the Pussycat) Lear and Edgar Allen Poe are also said to have owned or loved cats.
Among modern celebrities claimed as ailurophiles (cat lovers) are Patrick Stewart, Halle Berry, Jay Leno, Ellen Degeneres, Sean Astin, Kirsten Dunst, Jake Gyllenhaal, Marisa Tomei, Billy Crystal, Christina Ricci, Bo Derek, Linda Evans, Suzanne Somers, Victoria Principle, Andy Serkis, Warren Beatty, Antonio Banderas (who gave voice to Puss in Boots), Betty White, Aaron Neville, Yoko Ono, Ian Anderson and Frank Zappa.
Sources: Desmond Morris, Cat World,; Jamie Allen, Hemingway’s Key West home a mix of writer’s life, legend, CNN.com; Flippy’s Cat page (www.flippyscatpage.com/famouscatlovers.html)
