When the Cat’s Away...
A Victorian artist and avid bird-watcher banished cats from his country cottage, but soon wished he hadn’t.
1889
Queen Victoria 1837-1901
A Victorian artist and avid bird-watcher banished cats from his country cottage, but soon wished he hadn’t.
1889
Queen Victoria 1837-1901
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.
When I built a house in the country, fond as I am of cats, I determined not to keep any there, because they would destroy the birds’ nests and drive my feathered friends away, and I liked to watch and feed these from the windows.
Things went pleasantly for a while. The birds were fed, and paid for their keep with many and many a song. There were the old ones and there the young, and oft by the hour I watched them from the window; and they became so tame as scarcely caring to get out of my way when I went outside with more food. But — there is always a but — but one day, or rather evening, as I was ‘looking on,’ a rat came out from the rocks, and then another. Soon they began their repast on the remains of the birds’ food. Then in the twilight came mice, the short-tailed and the long, scampering hither and thither. This, too, was amusing.