July 12, 1817

Henry David Thoreau (July 12, 1817 to May 6, 1862) was one of the founding geniuses of American culture. Being a transcendentalist however, did not mean his sojourns in the woods were quite as solitary as you might think. He managed to drop his laundry off for Mrs. Emerson to wash.

But the exemplar of Emerson's "Self-Reliance", does do without domestic animals:

I kept neither dog, cat, cow, pig, nor hens, so that you would have said there was a deficiency of domestic sounds; neither the churn, nor the spinning-wheel, nor even the singing of the kettle, nor the hissing of the urn, nor children crying, to comfort one. An old-fashioned man would have lost his senses or died of ennui before this. Not even rats in the wall, for they were starved out, or rather were never baited in, — only squirrels on the roof and under the floor, a whippoorwill on the ridge-pole, a blue-jay screaming beneath the window, a hare or woodchuck under the house, a screech-owl or a cat-owl behind it, a flock of wild geese or a laughing loon on the pond, and a fox to bark in the night...

He can boast that he has "no path to the front-yard gate in the Great Snow, — no gate — no front-yard, — and no path to the civilized world!" It is these circumstances that allow a
"[s]ympathy with the fluttering alder and poplar leaves [that] almost takes away my breath..."

Thoreau however was interested in stories of a "flying cat," and traveled to see one. This was before his setting up house on Walden Pond. The cat in question was out hunting when he arrived but the thought of such a creature occupied his thoughts. He says:

Some thought it was part flying squirrel or some other wild animal, which is not impossible, for, according to naturalists, prolific hybrids have been produced by the union of the marten and domestic cat. This would have been the right kind of cat for me to keep, if I had kept any; for why should not a poet's cat be winged as well as his horse?

Indeed.