Recently, I spent a Sunday reading the famous, amusing book, Dog Gone Cat Case by Jay Scott Kanes. It was amusing for several reasons. I know the tiny location and also the author, who even, under a Lamma Island (Hong Kong) street lamp, signed the book for me. It also was amusing to get a picture of how much people really can love their pets.

Probably my biggest objection is that the cats too often think and talk like humans and so don't see the world from cats' perspectives. (Denmark's Hans Christian Andersen is a complete master in seeing the world from any position, be it a one-legged tin-soldier, a fragment of glass or the odd head of a herring in the gutter.)

I suggest that having “house cats", like the book's cat-fanciers, Rita and Wayne Tong, tends to be cruelty to animals. It was pleasing that the three youngsters found a way out of the house and that the Tongs never got to know about it.

Maybe I've caught a factual mistake: on page 33, Kanes writes that “a toad... hopped extra high". In Denmark, and I believe elsewhere, toads crawl and leave the hopping to frogs. Am I right?