The Kilkenny cats are a fabled pair of cats from County Kilkenny (or Kilkenny city in particular) in Ireland, who fought each other so ferociously that only their tails remained at the end of the battle. Often the absurd implication is that they have eaten each other. In the nineteenth century the Kilkenny cats were a common simile for any conflict likely to ruin both combatants. Kilkenny cat is also used more generally for a fierce fighter or quarrelsome person. These senses are now rather dated. In the later twentieth century the motif was reclaimed by Kilkenny people as a positive symbol of tenacity and fighting spirit, and "the Cats" is the county nickname for the Kilkenny hurling team. The original story is attested from 1807 as a simple joke or Irish bull; some early versions are set elsewhere than Kilkenny. Nevertheless, theories have been offered seeking a historical basis for the story's setting.
Versions of the story The earliest attested version of the story is from June 1807, in Anthologia, a collection of jokes and humorous pieces copied by "W.T." of Inner Temple from unnamed previous publications. Steven Connor characterises the story as an Irish bull. Under the heading "Kilkenny Cats" it runs:
In a company, consisting of naval officers, the discourse happened to turn on the ferocity of small animals; when an Irish gentleman present stated his opinion to be, that a Kilkenny cat, of all animals, was the most ferocious; and added, "I can prove my assertion, by a fact within my own knowledge:— I once," said he, "saw two of these animals fighting in a timber yard, and willing to see the result of a long battle, I drove them into a deep sawpit, and placing some boards over the mouth, left them to their amusement. Next morning I went to see the conclusion of the fight, and what d'ye think I saw?"– "One of the cats dead, probably," —replied one of the company.— "No by Ja—s! there was nothing left in the pit, but the two tails and a bit of flue!" The tale was repeated verbatim the next month in The European Magazine's review of Anthologia, as well as The Sporting Magazine, also in London, and Walker's Hibernian Magazine in Dublin. It reappeared in 1812 in Thomas Tegg's The Spirit of Irish Wit, and in the 1813 supplement to William Barker Daniel's Rural Sports. The following appears in Thomas Gilliland's The Trap, an 1808 satire on the theme of love:
When I was last at Kilkenny, said Teague, I saw two big ram-cats fight a duel for love, your honour; and they fought, and fought, till they ate each other up. Devil burn me, if I lie, your honour! I went after them into the gutter! "Tommy!" says I, "my dear Phely!" says I, but no Tommy or Phely was there: I found only the tips of their tails. An 1811 joke book from Boston in the United States included:
On a gentleman's reading an account of a tiger fight in the East Indies, an Irishman present exclaimed: 'a tiger be hang'd! Why, sir, I once myself saw two Kilkenny cats fight till they devoured each other up, excepting the very tips of their two tails.' Another version is alluded to in an 1816 critique of a pamphlet by Andrew O'Callaghan, master of Kilkenny College:
There is a story told in Kilkenny, that several cats had been locked up in a room, for a fortnight together, without food, and, upon opening the door, there was nothing found but the tail of one of them. Surely Mr. O'C. must have been dreaming of this native story, when he made his arguments thus to swallow themselves, after destroying each other—but the tail of one of them remains Responding to the 1816 critique, Rowley Lascelles, an English antiquarian based in Ireland, denied the existence of such a story, which he saw as a slur on Kilkenny. Although in 1835 John Neal called the story "one of the oldest and most undoubted Joe [Miller]s", the first edition of Joe Miller's Jests to include it was in 1836 (verbatim from Anthologia). Theodore Hook's 1837 novel Jack Brag jocularly sources the story to [Joe] Miller's History of Ireland.
Elsewhere than Kilkenny An 1817 memoir of the Irish wit John Philpot Curran situates the story in Sligo rather than Kilkenny, as a tall tale told by Curran:
Passing his first summer at Cheltenham ... he had resort to a story to draw himself into notice. ... The conversation of the table turning altogether on the stupid, savage, and disgusting amusement of cock-fighting, he was determined to put an end to it, by the incredible story of the Sligo cats. At [a cat-fight meeting in Sligo] three matches were fought on the first day ... and before the third of them was finished (on which bets ran very high), dinner was announced in the inn where the battle was fought. The company agreed ... to lock up the room, leaving the key in trust to Mr. Curran, who protested to God, he never was so shocked, that his head hung heavy on his shoulders, and his heart was sunk within him, on entering with the company into the room, and finding that the cats had actually eaten each other up, save some little bits of tails which were scattered round the room. The Irish part of the company saw the drift, ridicule, and impossibility of the narrative, and laughed immoderately, while the English part yawned and laughed, seeing others laugh, and sought relief in each other's countenances. In Real life in Ireland, an 1821 stage Irish novel by Pierce Egan, Captain Grammachree, a retired soldier, tells Brian Boru, a young country squire, of a cat-fight in the neighbourhood of Dublin:
'There was hundreds betted, but not a cross won or lost; for by Jasus! they left nothing on the ground but a bunch of hair and two tails!' 'What!' said Brian, 'then I suppose the cats ran away?' 'An Irish cat run away!' sneered Grammachree, 'no; never! by the powers of Moll Kelly! they eat one another up!' An 1830 "dialogue on Popery" by one Jacob Stanley summarises "the Travellers tale of the Irish Cat fight", giving no specific location.
The battle of the cats of Ireland S. Redmond in 1864 in Notes and Queries recounted a tale told to him "more than thirty years" earlier when he was "very young" by "a Kilkenny gentleman", about a battle "some forty years before" [i.e. about 1790] on "a plain near that ancient city":
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