Quick question, since you actually KNEW Terry Pratchett, was he more of a dog or a cat person?
Cat.
@dduane and I were at a con with him in Amsterdam, and went “off-campus” to try a recommended restaurant. The place was a converted warehouse, with a high, high ceiling, and there was a narrow frame running round it about 30 feet up.
We were talking shop - editors and their value, IIRC - when Terry stopped talking and stared upwards to where a cat was ambling along the frame.
He kept staring for nearly five minutes to “see what the cat would do” (stare down at us, then go to sleep among the rafters) and conversation didn’t resume properly until he was absolutely sure the cat wasn’t going to do anything else more interesting.
Definitely cat.
But realistically so, well aware there’s a lot more wildness in Felis domesticus than the name suggests.
(Unlike a dog, thoroughly domesticated right up to the instant it isn’t. If the domesticity snaps the dog’s likely to snap as well, with all its teeth, and with a big enough dog that’s when things go very wrong very fast.)
Though he wrote “The Unadulterated Cat” (not “…Dog”) I think that though Terry was a cat person (much better for a writer, as DD and I both know) he was an equal-opportunity dog / cat liker.
Indeed dogs seem to have got a better Discworld write-up - look at Laddie (”Good boy Laddie!”), Thcrapth and of course The Amazing Gaspode.
Compare it to the briefly-talking cat in “Moving Pictures” and of course The Amazing Maurice - sarcastic, cynical and opportunistic. With that in mind, I suspect there’s cat DNA in Gaspodealong with at least one disease of sheep…
Of course there’s Granny Weatherwax’s view:
“If cats looked like frogs we’d realise what nasty, cruel little bastards they are.”
But then there’s Death’s view:
“Cats,” he said eventually. “Cats are nice.”
Terry knows if it’s true, because his family was with him when he died - and that included his own cat, snoozing on his bed.
