Ticketing details

Kitch-iti-kipi, the Big Spring, near Manistique, Michigan.

This could be subtitled: versions of a not-memorable ditty…or, ticketing in the old days….

A dog is a dog and a cat is a dog, and a squirrel in a cage is a parrot, but a tortoise, he’s a hinsect, so he rides free.

I heard this long ago, and vaguely remember it referred to ticket costs when riding? what, a train? a bus?, but nothing more.

Now, buried in the on-line correspondence in the New York Review of Books is this, attributed to Freeman Dyson:

When I was a boy in England long ago, people who traveled on trains with dogs had to pay for a dog ticket. The question arose whether I needed to buy a dog ticket when I was traveling with a tortoise. The conductor on the train gave me the answer: “Cats is dogs and rabbits is dogs but tortoises is insects and travel free according.�?

And this, from a 1869 Punch cartoon caption of a railway porter advising a woman traveling with her no-doubt beloved animals:

“STATION MASTER SAY, MUM, AS CATS IS ‘DOGS,’ AND RABBITS IS ‘DOGS,’ AND SO’S PARROTS; BUT THIS ’ERE ‘TORTIS’ IS A INSECT, SO THERE AIN’T NO CHARGE FOR IT!�?

…both from Nicholas Humphrey, resident of Cambridge, England.

Well, this is as far as I can go; maybe someone knows more of the story, or how this came into folk memory (a quick Google turns up nothing)…. Certainly, classification has deep human roots….

One comment

  1. mouse's moom says:

    I went to Kitch-iti-kipi once when I was a kid. I was absolutely fascinated! It seemed so beautiful. Tried to repeat the experience with my kids. Unfortunately, it rained cats and dogs that day and we really couldn’t see *anything* because the water surface was so bumpy.

    I dunno where the roots of that ticket thing came from but I had to laugh when Dyson said he wasn’t sure if it was a real memory or not because I do that same kind of thing all the time. Did it happen? Was I there when it happened or have I just heard it so many times I think I was there? Or did I dream it?