Life & Wisdom Quote by Oliver Herford

A cat, in Herford's hands, isn’t a pet so much as a tiny sovereign who has agreed to share your living room. Calling it a “pygmy lion” is a sly compression of the whole feline brand: majesty shrunk to domestic scale, predatory hardware packaged as household charm. The joke lands because it flatters the cat’s self-image while quietly mocking ours. We want companionship; the cat offers pageantry.

Herford’s verb choices do the real work. The cat “loves” mice - an intentionally perverse tenderness that reframes hunting as affection, letting cruelty masquerade as devotion. It “hates dogs,” a line that taps the cultural stereotype of canine earnestness versus feline contempt. Dogs are democratic; they meet you where you are. Cats are aristocratic; they expect you to meet them where they’ve decided to be.

Then comes the clincher: the cat “patronizes human beings.” That word is the pivot from animal description to social satire. Patronage isn’t mere aloofness; it’s condescension with a smile, the sort of superiority that keeps you coming back for approval. Herford is winking at the way humans narrate the cat’s indifference as “independence,” and its intermittent affection as a gift. The subtext is a neat inversion of domestication: we think we’ve tamed the creature, but the creature has trained us to accept attention as tribute.

Written in an era obsessed with class signals and manners, the cat becomes a compact caricature of the well-bred snob - petite, elegant, ruthless, and somehow still irresistible.