The Tail of Thomas Kat is a 1917 cartoon. Not much is known about the cartoon, but both an Australian ABC-TV documentary screened in 2004 and the curators of an exhibition at the State Library of New South Wales in 2005 suggested that Thomas Kat was a prototype or precursor of Felix the Cat.
Few details of Thomas have survived. His fur color has not been definitively established, and the surviving copyright synopsis for the short suggests significant differences between Thomas and the later Felix.
Plot[]
The cat is rocking in a chair, and his tail is through a knothole in the fence. A chicken grabs it in its beak and pulls it out till it snaps. The cat goes through the fence to settle with the chicken. They fight and the cat leaves the chicken for dead. But he wakes up, comes through the fence, and pulls the cat's tail right out. The cat cries. Along comes a dog and laughs at the cat. Then a boy ties a tin can to the dog's tail, and the cat is consoled, for it sees that tails are no good, after all.