“Did Elvis have a cat?”
The Four-Year-Old: “You know what that room needs, Elvis? A cat.” (Image of a room at Graceland by Ian McKellar via Flickr)
The Four-Year-Old adores dinosaurs, cats, and Elvis. So naturally she wants to know all the combinations in which these revered beings might co-exist. Dinosaurs as my daughter thinks of them died out years before Elvis was born, he clearly wouldn’t have had them as pets at Graceland.
The Four-Year-Old, curiously: “Did Elvis ever have a cat?”
I didn’t know, so we asked the iPhone.
Did Elvis ever have a cat?
Sadly for my daughter’s dreams, an initial search of the Web Hive Mind seemed to imply that Elvis did not have a cat. Some in the Hive even went so far as to suggest that Elvis, who loved most animals, actually hated cats. This scurrilous rumor, if true, would be absolutely crushing for The Four-Year-Old, for reasons I surely don’t need to go into.
So here at Caterpickles, we choose to believe Eddie Deezen, who submitted a guest post for Neatorama on the topic of Elvis and his animals. In the post, Deezen reports that Elvis, whose childhood pets included a rooster and several dogs, kept a monkey, spider monkeys, peacocks, chickens, pigs, poodles, and at least two dogs–a Great Pyrenees and a chow–at Graceland. More importantly, according to Deezen, although Elvis apparently found other homes for most of the stray cats who wandered onto his property at Graceland, he did keep one cat, which he named Wendell after Wendell Corey, his co-star on the movie, Loving You.
The Four-Year-Old and I have no doubt that Wendell was “Elvis’s very favoritest pet.”
Update: For those of us who recognize birds as dinosaurs, there’s good news! So long as Wendell’s tenure overlapped with at least one peacock, rooster, or chicken, there would in fact have been a point in time when The Four-Year-Old could have found her three favorite things — Elvis, cats, and dinosaurs–co-existing peacefully in one place.
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- In which my daughter rolls some dice and tells yet another story (caterpickles.com)
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- If you buy a preschooler the Elv1s: 30 #1 Hits album (caterpickles.com)
- Elvis Presley and His Animals (neatorama.com)
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- Pets of the Week: Elvis & the Chihuahuas (laist.com)
CATERPICKLES 
4 Responses to ““Did Elvis have a cat?””
According to Nancy Rook, one of the cook/housekeepers from the 1960’s to the 1980’s – there was dogs, peacocks, chickens, horses, monkeys and other animals – but only one cat.
Lisa had a kitten at Graceland.
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Interesting. I’ll have to find her book. The Four-Year-Old will be positively entranced by the thought of a kitten in Elvis’ home.
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[…] Did Elvis have a cat? (Caterpickles) […]
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[…] a few rocky points in their relationship, however. Like that time The Four-Year-Old learned that Elvis didn’t really like cats. And then there was that dark December day in 2011 when Mommyo played Elvis’s Christmas […]
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