Animal Stories
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘Animal Stories’
A Victorian artist and avid bird-watcher banished cats from his country cottage, but soon wished he hadn’t.
Harrison Weir was a Victorian artist, engraver and illustrator who specialised in drawing animals, especially songbirds. He was also mad about cats (in 1871 he organised the world’s first cat show) and assumed, naturally enough, that his two passions were incompatible. He discovered, however, that he could not have been more wrong.
A French poodle won the heart of a fastidious English officer by covering him in mud.
The cat, wrote Nora Alleyne, has been the heroine of many extraordinary tales of homing instinct, yet other animals deserve a mention, such as the flock of sheep that repatriated themselves from Yorkshire to their breeding-ground north of the Cheviots. There are numerous stories of dogs, too, finding a way home in the face of overwhelming obstacles.
Twenty teams of dogs ran a life-or-death race against time over Alaska’s frozen trails to bring medicines to desperately sick children.
In the icy winter of 1924-25, the town of Nome in Alaska was completely cut off by road, rail, air and sea. When Curtis Welch, Nome’s only doctor, diagnosed diphtheria among the town’s children in mid-January, the race was on to bring thousands of doses of antitoxin from the nearest railway station, 674 miles away over the old Iditarod Trail. American women were among those agog for the latest updates.
A cat moved home from Edinburgh to Glasgow and seemed to settle in nicely, but it turned out she was only biding her time.
In a pamphlet published in 1815, the anonymous authors took a look at British zoology, aiming (they said) to amuse, to instruct and “to look through Nature up to Nature’s God”. The collection of anecdotes about cats included this remarkable story, a tale of stubborn determination worthy of Robert the Bruce’s famous spider.
Sir Nicholas L’Estrange recalls two astonishing eyewitness accounts of the resourcefulness the fox.
The following two tales are given to us as eyewitness accounts of the astonishing resourcefulness of the fox, using careful planning and employing tools to get what he wants. Author Sir Nicholas L’Estrange found such tales of foxy ingenuity difficult to believe, but King James I (r. 1603-1625) was altogether less suspicious.
In Jim Baker’s considered opinion, the bluejay had a much better command of language than Mark Twain’s cats did.
While walking in the woods near Heidelberg, Mark Twain was subjected to a barrage of derisory comment by three ravens. Not that he pretended to understand their language, but he got the gist of it well enough. That set him thinking about talking animals, and remembering what grizzled Californian miner Jim Baker had once told him about the ravens’ cousin, the bluejay.