Headscratchers / Lady and the Tramp

• Before the rat can jump into the baby's crib, Tramp grabs it by the neck and throws it away. How did the rat not die from the force of that?
• During the film's climax, when the Rat sneaks into the house to attack Jim Jr., where were Si and Am? They’re cats!
  • Maybe Aunt Sarah had put them to sleep by that hour or they were just in another room.
• At the film's climax, after Tramp kills the Rat and Aunt Sarah comes to the scene, how did she not smell the rat’s odor upon entering the room?
  • Maybe she did catch the odor, but she assumed that it came from Tramp? He’s a mongrel who came in off the street; it’s easy to believe he might not smell very nice just from looking at him. Not to mention he came in from the rain. The smell of a wet dog can be pretty overpowering on its own.
  • Aside of that, who says that the Rat smelled bad on the first place? Though it's common for rats to smell badly due most of them living in the sewers, that doesn’t mean that all of them do.
  • This entire question rests on the presumption that the rat had any kind of "foul odour" to begin with. Contrary to popular belief, rats - even wild ones - are naturally very clean animals. The only reason one would carry a "foul odour" naturally is due to its environment (say, living in a sewer) where the smell would be a by-product, not something necessarily caused by the animal itself; there's no indication that the rat, though looking extremely feral, would have been living in that kind of environment, more likely it had a permanent home somewhere in or close to the garden of the house. Also, corpses - even rat corpses - don't begin to stink the second they drop dead. Aunt Sarah entered the room at most five minutes in-universe after the rat was killed and most likely she didn't even take that long; that's hardly enough time for any kind of smell to develop from the rat's corpse. There's honestly no earthly reason why she, being established already as hating dogs and especially not wanting dogs around the baby, would have had any reason not to think this clearly stray dog had somehow got into the house and tried to attack the child.
• We're told that dogs can't talk to non-human primates due to the latter being "too closely related to humans". Fair enough, but if Animal Talk in this world comes down to phylogenetic relationships then how come Lady and Tramp have no trouble conversing with an alligator? They honestly should've had an easier time communicating with the apes since they, like dogs, are at least mammals.
  • When Tramp said that the apes "wouldn't understand" because they were too close to humans, I interpreted that as meaning that they might take the humans' side and not want to help get the muzzle off.
• How did Lady know that the rat was coming? Granted, dogs have really good hearing and smell, but the rat was super quiet, and if what the person above said is any indication, the rat wasn't smelly, so how did Lady sense it?
  • She's a dog and presumably has a dog's sense of smell, so she could smell things that Aunt Sarah can't.
• How long was Lady kept in that gift box before Darling opened it?
  • Doesn't have to be too long. He could have bought Lady that evening and kept her hidden in the garage, or have a friend take care of her temporarily. Then he wraps the gift and says "Oh Darling, let's open a present".
• If Jim Dear and Darling are just Pet Names, why did that one party address Darling as that instead of something like "Jim's Wife". Sure it works in phrases like "You look radiant, Darling" but not so much in the phrase "Nobody is as radiant as Darling"
  • It’s possible that her friends started a trend of calling her “Darling” to make fun of how Jim Dear called her “Darling” all the time. As time went on, though, they started thinking that it actually was a catchy nickname for her and it stuck.
• In the movie proper, there is no indication that the family was aware of Tramp, so this issue is nonexistent in the the film itself. On an old interactive book-on-tape, however (a fully licensed Disney product), Jim Dear refers to Tramp by name immediately after the rat is discovered. So, you are aware of a stray dog in the area who apparently has a reputation for many forms of mischief, and you don't at the very least think to get your little princess of a pooch fixed?
  • In all fairness, spaying and neutering at the time wasn't really well known, let alone commonplace, along with Lady being so obedient, usually.
  • Spaying female dogs didn’t become functionally possible until the 1930s, and wasn’t remotely common until the 60s-70s.
• Trusty and Jock run down the dogcatcher...who doesn't, you know, stop so he can catch them, a couple of dogs harassing traffic.
  • In fairness, judging by the dogcatcher's lines and the speed of the horses—nearly a flat-out gallop on city streets in the dark?—it's made fairly explicit that Trusty's baying and snapping have thrown the horses into a panic. The dogcatcher is trying to stop.
• What is Aunt Sarah feeding that infant? Infant formula existed in the movie’s era but it was fairly crude and wasn’t something you’d chose unless necessary following the mother’s death or abandonment or similar.
  • Possibly goat milk, which is about the closest to human milk in terms of taste and digestibility that you could get before modern baby formula.
• Why would Jim Dear and Darling leave their newborn baby at home? Even if they leave their aunt to look after him, it doesn't seem like a very good idea for a mother to leave a baby that young. Also, who was looking after the baby when Aunt Sarah wasn't there (when she went to the pet store to buy a muzzle)?
  • Probably a neighbor or teen babysitter was watching the baby if it was just for an hour or so. Plus with the larger crib and baby clothes on the line there was probably a time-skip of a month or so. It is also probable that Jim and his wife needed to go to a wedding or something out of town.
• The film never reveals exactly how and where Aunt Sarah found out that Lady had been captured by the dogcatcher and was sent to the pound before picking her up there.
  • Aunt Sarah likely either heard about it through word-of-mouth, or just ended up reporting to the authorities that Lady was missing, and then eventually learned that she was at the pound.
  • How Aunt Sarah reacted when Lady was at the pound is also never revealed. Despite almost always being upset with her, she was probably so worried about Lady the whole time she was gone that she was happy to have retrieved her, but after having apparently been told by that the staff at the pound about the chicken chase incident, she became even more angry that she decided to put Lady on a leash chained to her doghouse as punishment.