First one that popped into my head, and nobody’s mentioned it yet?
**Sandy ** the squirrel from Spongebob Squarepants.
Feminism 101, y’all.
(Male) cartoonists drew animal characters, quite often without giving the sex of the critter a first thought. (It’s a squirrel, not a boy squirrel or a girl squirrel.) Then, sooner or later, some element of the plot or a possible storyline or situation would involve sexuality and the squirrel becomes a boy squirrel because that’s the standpoint from which the sexuality gets dubbed in.
It’s akin to one of those pseudo-universal statements like “Imagine our cave-dwelling ancestor, who needed no credit card or Maserati sports coupe, but only some mammoth steaks, a warm safe cave, and a pretty cave-chick to drag back to it, aah those were the days” – it’s not so much that “the neuter is male by default” but that if, at some point, the question of the sex or sexuality of the neuter-so-far individual comes up, the (male) author/artist/etc tends to dub in the guy-traits and guy-parts. Normal parts, not girl-parts. Parts like his, you know.
I won’t say it never occurs, but you less often hear someone start off with a (supposedly) gender-neutral construct like “early man” and end up with a statement like “Early man did well in the border area between savannah and forest, finding plenty of food as well as sufficient shelter from predators and a safe place to give birth when she was pregnant”.
I suspect if more cartoonists had been female you’d have more female animal characters; and if the unconscious male-is-normal cultural perspective had been less in play during the years when these characters were created, that, too, would have yielded more female animal characters.
The innumerable anime cat girls don’t count? 
More recently Babs Bunny has developed into an independent character (not a girlfriend) in both Tiny Toons and Baby Loony Toons.
Gaget from Chip and Dale’s Rescue Rangers.
In the X-rated category I’d like to note Omaha The Cat Dancer.
As a little girl, I remember feeling betrayed when they said Big Bird was a boy. The only way I knew was they called him one, and used he. I thought for quite a while the Big Bird was a girl. Is there any reason that Big Bird had to be a boy? More annoying is when they made the sick-making Zoe and made a big deal of her being a girl monster.
I think AHunter3 did a pretty good job explaining some of the reasons behind the phenomenon. But also I think it has something to do with the kind of humor in cartoons, and especially in animal cartoons. There’s often a great deal of slapstick and cartoon violence, and the average person is less comfortable laughing at violence involving females.
Nope. I remember one cartoon where Wile E. Coyote creates a manequin of a female roadrunner (with a wig and long eyelashes) and Roadrunner is turned on by it.
(Sure, it’s theoretically possible that Roadrunner was a lesbian, but given when those cartoons were made, the probability of that is roughly equal to the probability that George W. Bush will nominate Saddam Hussein to the Supreme Court. )
[QUOTE=Krokodil]
Gertie the Dinosaur and Krazy Kat . Two of the earliest. Gertie’s not particularly feminineQUOTE]
Oh, I beg to differ! If you’ve ever seen the actual film (and if you haven’t, run out and get Winsor McCay: The Master Edition ), you wouldn’t know that our first animation star is very delicate and ladylike, in spite of her girth. It’s a really sweet cartoon.
That pretty much nails it. Oddly enough, last Sunday’s strip was not the first time Breathed addressed the subject of the lack of female cartoon animal characters. When he did “Bloom County,” there was a series of strips where they tried to come up with a non-girlfriend female animal character but found it wasn’t funny when she was in a situation where she was the victim of a violent gag. Like you said, Breathed came to the conclusion that there are some things which are unthinkingly funny when they involve males (e.g., aggressive knockabout humor) but are as funny as a tax audit if they involve females.
Nitpick: I believe the female lagomorph toddler in Baby Looney Tunes (ick) is supposed to be Lola Bunny, not Babs.
Babs (and Buster) has gotten shuffled off to the dustbin of history, it seems. (sigh)
Offhand I can name quite a few. (Some of these fit the parameters better than others.) Maisy mouse, Goose and Hen from “Little Bear”, Baloo’s lady boss Rebecca Cunningham who owns his airplane in “Talespin”, and her daughter Molly. Webigail (Webby) from Ducktales, Sally cat in “The Busy World of Richard Scarry”, (there was more than one token female in that show), Blue from “Blues clues”, Kanga from “Winnie the Pooh”, Flopsy, Mopsy, and Cotton Tail from “Peter Rabbit”. Shenzi the Hyena from “The Lion King” was the brains of the bunch. Also, Sagwa from the PBS show, and Francine from Arthur.
Again, it’s not female characters, or even animal female characters, but animal female MAIN characters, of the kind they name the cartoon after.
Sagwa, (The previous link about Sagwa in my other post shows proof that the character is indeed female.)Maisy Mouse, Blue? Those are all female “main” characters, from whom the shows got their name. As for some of the others I mentioned, they got their own episodes, or had as much air time or more than their male counterparts. They were as important to the “plot” as the males, if not more so. That is why I mentioned them.
The Wise Little Hen had a female lead. And a secondary character named Donald making his first appearance.
According to their own storyline, Buster and Babs were shuffled off to Hollywood Squares. Babs may not count for the purposes of this OP; Buster is introduced first in the pilot, and the implication of “No relation!” is that they will be dating.
Dot Warner is also iffy, because she’s not an animal. She’s a Warner, its own sui generis. This site has an image of the four early Warners, and speculation the proto-Dot was only a girlfriend at first, before the two younger brothers merged.
Breathed expounded on this in his Onion AV Club interview:
I dunno. It is clear that they aren’t human and although we aren’t sure what kind of animals they are, it seems pretty clear that they are animals too. They have tails like animals and big floppy ears and a snout. During the show it was common for them to play off of the fact that their species are undetermined, but it still seems pretty clear to me that they are indeed animals.