NEW YORK — When word spread late last month that cats would be joining the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show, internet outrage fed off confusion about whether the show, one of the world’s premier animal competitions, was about to become a mongrel event.
Cue the predictable responses, especially the scene from the original “Ghostbusters” film in which Dr. Peter Venkman, played by Bill Murray, warns the mayor of New York of “dogs and cats living together — mass hysteria.”
“People were talking about it being the end of days,” Anthony Hutcherson of Port Tobacco, Maryland, said Saturday while caressing Ovation, his leopard-spotted Bengal cat, at an event that many had feared would sully Westminster.
In truth, no Abyssinian or munchkin longhair will invade the 141st Westminster show Monday and Tuesday at Madison Square Garden, trotting out on a leash to compete for the best-in-show prize. But Saturday, for the first time, cats shared space with dogs on Piers 92 and 94 at the American Kennel Club’s Meet the Breeds event — something of a pet expo that has become a preamble to the Westminster show.
So how did this commingling come about?
A few years ago, the International Cat Association held a separate show at the Javits Center, in conjunction with the American Kennel Club, at the same time as the all-dog Meet the Breeds. That apparently stoked interest in a reprise.
“We decided to bring the cats back because people kept asking us, ‘Where are the cats?’” said Brandi Hunter, a spokeswoman for the American Kennel Club.
Not just any cat is suitable for such an event, given the crowd noise, the masses of unwashed hands thrust their way and, of course, all the dogs in attendance.
But after seven hours together, this much was true: The dogs and the cats got along, and the world continued to spin on its axis.
“With the seriousness of the issues and the disagreements people have with friends and neighbors after the election, poking fun at cats and dogs being in one room together is a way to make fun of ourselves,” said Hutcherson, Ovation’s owner.
He said this while holding his cat in a booth decorated with a safari scene: inflated monkeys, giraffes, elephants and lions. Some of the other Bengal owners and handlers in the booth were dressed in khaki.
Thousands of spectators mingled with breeders and snuggled and kissed members of the nearly 40 breeds of cats and 120 breeds of dogs, each type in a booth decorated to represent its ancestry. All that separated the cats from the dogs was an aisle.
“Do they make leopard noises?” one spectator asked the Bengal breeder.
“No, they make kitty noises,” Hutcherson said.
Behind him was the cat agility ring. (Yes, that’s a thing.)
Cats pounced over the bubble jump (a bar sandwiched by balance-training balls), slinked through clear tunnels, hopped through hoops and mastered the mirror jump — which, as the name implies, is a bar stationed over a mirror.
“Dogs would never do that mirror jump,” the ringmaster, Vicki Shields, said as she riffled through a box full of shiny, feathery wands used to entice the cats through the obstacles.
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