- by Owen Morton
This may seem like a rather odd question, and not the sort of thing we usually seek to answer on this website. But then, we’ve had all sorts of completely random rubbish on this site (one of the first that springs to mind is the Mr. Suter Worship Site of March 2001) so I don’t see why I shouldn’t make an attempt on this interesting conundrum.
At first sight, as well as being very odd, the question would appear to be self-answering. A cat is not a dog because it’s a cat, isn’t it? Ah, yes, but … and here we descend into lunatic ravings the like of which have never been seen since someone decided it might be nice for S Club 7 to release a single.
The point is, the creatures that come under the heading 'dogs' are wide and varying. Cats (by which I mean domestic cats) all look pretty much the same: they’re all the same size except in very rare cases, and most of them are different only by colouring (except the Manx, which as we all know, has no tail, the Sphinx, which has no fur and the Scottish Fold, which has a particularly interesting set of ears). But dogs are another matter. It is hard to see, for example, where a demented-looking beast like the dachshund could possibly be related to a vicious creature like a pit bull. They don’t look remotely similar. One waddles along gracelessly and the other proceeds in leaps and bounds. They might be joined in a mutual desire to rip your throat out, but they then differ again in that only the pit bull is capable of doing so.
So why is a dachshund classed as a dog when another land mammal like, oh, I don’t know, the cat, is not? They both share pretty much the same characteristics: four legs, two eyes, two ears, one nose, one mouth, whiskers and a desire to maim and kill any living creature that it is within its power to do so. Okay, they are quite obviously different species – I’m not disputing that – but then various creatures which are both dogs are obviously different species as well: the Yorkshire terrier and the greyhound are not the same. If a Yorkshire terrier tried to run as fast as a greyhound, it would burst its little heart.
If you ask me, cats are merely another sort of dog, and it will be much clearer when scientists realise this and just reclassify cats into the dog family. Pedants will say that cats are felines and dogs are canines, which again I won’t argue with. But I would venture that maybe felines are just another kind of canine. Cats are almost exactly the same as dogs: perhaps a particularly independent species of dog, but one nonetheless.
In fact, one could take this argument a little way further and suggest that in fact everything previously classed as a bird is also a dog. The connexion is perhaps a little more tenuous, but we can easily point out that birds are simply dogs with beaks and two wings instead of two of their legs. And once one has accepted that birds are dogs, it is only a small step to realise that so are insects, fish, land mammals and in fact pretty much everything else that is alive. Except wombats, because they’re just nasty.
On the other hand, if we started calling everything that’s alive on this planet a dog, we’d probably soon get rather confused. Think about it: there’d be only two species on the planet, dogs and wombats. If someone said to you, "do you know anything about how to cure my dog’s stomach ache?" you wouldn’t know whether they were talking about their halibut or their tortoise, and therefore you’d have to go into all sorts of "what sort of dog is it?" discussions before you could be sure of giving the right answer.
That would obviously not be a good thing, because it would lengthen conversations no end. Therefore, what we would have to do is subdivide all the dogs into different species of dog and give them other names like 'cat', 'bird', 'fish' and so forth. Then you could change the word 'dog' to 'animal' and then you’d have all sorts of these things called 'animals' which all have different names! This would prevent people getting confused.
I really don’t know why no one’s come up with this idea before. It’ll change the world, I promise you.