Oddly enough, I’ve met fewer “crazy dog men.” I’m sure some exist, though.

my mom asked me recently if i was going to become “some crazy dog lady”. she was also dead serious. so my mom fears that i might. but then again it just might be my mom….

A “dog person” I would assume adhere strongly to the principle of social hierarchy in both personal, spiritual and political matters. Someone is big and strong in terms of physical force, therefore he/she dictates terms. Someone is smart, popular, has alot of money, is spiritually enlightened, therefore he or she is the natural leader of your social group.

A “cat person” I imagine to be more independantly minded. Such individuals form social groups not around hierarchy but rather careful selection. They still derive their confidence and self-image from social acceptance, this is inevitable since humans are flock animals. What differentiates them is how they seek that acceptance. They are more likely to actively seek out like-minded individuals rather than attempt to conform to or dictate already established intellectual or political norms.

Please tell me if this makes any sense, otherwise I wont know whether or not I have failed miserably.

As far as the linguistic argument goes, it should be handled cautiously. It may be a linguistic remnant of a past cultural dichotomy, and that dichotomy may not hold the associations we would give it. In the case of dog and bitch, we have two terms for the animal, one with a more specific use than the other. The first does not necessarily need to be exclusionary — in the every day life of a Saxon, you can hunt with a female dog just as well as with a male. But only a bitch can raise the whelps.(Why the term dog persisted at all is unknown to me. The more common OE term for a dog was the root for our present “hound.”)

As for cats, there is also a name for female cats:

b. The male or he-cat (formerly also boar-cat, ram-cat) is now colloquially called tom-cat (see TOM); formerly and still in north Engl. and Sc. gib-cat (see GIB); the female or she-cat was formerly also doe-cat.

My guess is that the only reason tom-cat persists at all is because of the derogatory slang term for a womanizing man derived from it.

This even shows in our (English) language: which sex is the default, and which is the sex that we must mark to make the point that it’s different? Language-wise, the default for cats is female, the marked state is male (TOM cat); the default state for dogs is male, the marked state is female (bitch in the original sense of the word.)

But then again…there’s some counterexamples too. Lassie. Garfield. Heathcliff. And I always assumed Marmaduke was a girl dog? Was that right?