Right now I’m watching Cats on Ovation. (Don’t feel bad if you’ve never heard of the channel. I had never heard of it before today.) At any rate, I had to reach for my computer to write this quick entry because I realized something: Cats probably wouldn’t exist without Brer Rabbit.

“Courtney,” you might be thinking right now, “What are you talking about? And who cares?” Well I can’t really answer that last question (except to say that clearly I do), but I CAN tell you what I’m talking about.

The author of the book Cats is based on, Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, was a big fan of the Brer Rabbit tales. In fact, T.S. Eliot and fellow poet Ezra Pound were so enthralled by these stories that in their letters to each other, in which they wrote in the same dialect found in the stories, they referred to each other by nicknames: Old Possum and Brer Rabbit.

So it just makes sense that these tales of talking animals living along the big road influenced the creation of Eliot’s own book of anthropomorphic animals.

It always amazes me when I learn of a way Brer Rabbit has influenced the world that I had been previously unaware of. This is just a prime example of why I started this site. One day soon I really should write about why I think the Walt Disney Company itself might not have existed without him. Can you imagine what the world today would have been like without Disney? So much technology came from the Imagineers’ development.

The world would have been a different place without Brer Rabbit.