I have long felt that dogs—unlike cats—are professionals, and Charlie Dog is just a sterling example of that professionalism. A cat is a cat. Period. From the time that the cat first condescended to let man and woman feed, scratch, and pet him, with no obligation on his part to do anything in return, the cat has resisted almost every effort to change his appearance, his size, or his temperament for the convenience of man. He insists on walking on his wild lone. Whereas the dog, who started out as stalwart, strong, wild, and wolf-like, has flopped over on his kowtowable back, legs astraddle, and allowed man to convert him into everything from a Mexican hairless to a great Dane (usually with weak hindquarters), from the smashed-in nose of the pug and the English bull to the pointy nose of the Russian wolfhound and the collie. Yes, man put on his genetic gloves and pummeled, smashed, pulled, tugged noble dog into shapes so remote from the original that a chihuahua could mate with a Saint Bernard only with the help of a step-ladder and a midwife, and all this with the active and apparently enthusiastic assistance of the dog.
Contrast this with the “domestic” cat. The same energy poured forth by man to reform the dog has had only the following results with the cat: We have varied the length and color of the cat’s hair. We have observed and tried to take credit for the tailless Manx cat, the Siamese cat, and other variations. But there is no scientific evidence but that the cat arranged these variations for its own convenience. Try as we may, we have been unable to vary the size and weight of cats as contrasted with dogs: one (1) Labrador retriever equals twenty-five (25) Yorkies. The cat stubbornly (and serenely) sticks to its own proper range of size and weight. The smallest and the largest domestic cats vary in almost exactly the same ratio as do human beings, excluding nature’s genetic eccentricities: midgets and giants. Human beings range normally from perhaps 4′10″ to 6′4″ and from 100 to 220 pounds. Twenty percent variation in height to around fifty percent in weight, and so it is with cats.
Mark Antony and Pussyfoot in the get-acquainted sequence—dog meets cat: FEED THE KITTY (1952)
A cat is a cat is a cat. And that is it.
A dog can be a lapdog; a watchdog; a fawning, servile slob; a violent, murderous bastard; a kissy, big-hearted, great-eyed, crawly lover—and is really and too often an abysmal caricature of the worst in mankind. You feed him, cuff him, pull his ears, slap him silly, it’s all one to him. “I knew he was my master,” says the Kid in Richard Harding Davis’s The Bar Sinister, “because he kicked me.”
If you make a fool of yourself in front of a cat, he will sneer at you, if you are sober; he will leave the room if you are drunk. If you make a fool of yourself in front of a dog, he will make a fool of himself, too.
Charlie is the first honest dog I ever met. He freely admits that he is out to get adopted and will use any method available to achieve his purpose. He may not be lovable, but he most certainly is honest. “You ain’t got no pet, I ain’t got no master,” he points out to the owner of a posh restaurant in A Hound for Trouble. “I’ll make you a preposition.” In Dog Gone South, in an effort to impress a Southern plantation owner, he assumed the identity of a Rebel soldier returning from Gettysburg: “Oh, suh, it was horrible, Yankees to the left, Yankees to the right, but ah saved the regiment.” He dies saluting and sobbing, “Chitlins forever!”
So, just as Bugs is not your ordinary rabbit, Charlie is not your ordinary dog. Bugs, as a rabbit, is uniquely notable for intrepidity and love of combat; Charlie, as a dog, is remarkable for honesty.
I have watched with fascination his [Daffy’s] growth from his earliest haphazard puerile personality, through adolescence, to the splendid bombast of his maturity in the fifties. Daffy has become the spokesman for the egoist in everyone, but he remains always undaunted by the inevitable requital: the fear of consequences that makes cowards of the rest of us.
—ROBERT D. TSCHIRGI, M.D., PH.D.
Professor of Neurosciences
University of California, La Jolla
February 14, 1985
The first surfacing of that part of my character that was later to show up in Daffy Duck occurred at the age of six. My sixth-birthday party, to be precise. I was immensely proud—it seems to me that all my life I have taken the most pride in things over which I have little or no control. Even though I had older sisters, it never occurred to me that anyone had ever become six years old before, and the splendid cake, candles bravely ablaze in salute to my maturity, was ample evidence that I had entered into manhood.
Having blown out the candles and, as a side benefit, managing to send most of the smoke up my little brother’s nostrils, I was handed the knife, my first baton of any kind of authority in six misspent years, and was told to cut as large a piece as I liked. At this point Daffy Duck must have had, for me, his earliest beginnings, because I found to my surprise and pleasure that I had no desire to share my cake with anyone. I courteously returned the knife to my mother. I had no need for it, I explained; I would simplify the whole matter by taking the entire cake for myself. Not knowing she had an incipient duck on her hands, she laughed gently and tried to return the knife to my reluctant grasp. I again explained that the knife was superfluous. It was
