Static Interface Pattern

Question

Summary
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Define an interface which declares static methods.
The essence of what I mean by this is: define a number of classes which contain/provide access to common methods to which we can make static calls.
Details
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What we are trying to achieve here is effectively an interface which garuantees us that the classes of a particular type (with a common parent class/interface) will all contain a specific method to which we have static access.
Simple example
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Here we have two classes that implement the Animal interface (Dog and Cat). Each class supplies a static method getType() which returns some non-instance-specific information (this method is static because the type is the same for all instances of the given class. E.g. ALL Dogs are of type 'Doggy').
interface Animal
class Dog implements Animal
    public static String getType()
        return "Doggy";
class Cat implements Animal
    public static String getType()
        return "Kitty";
}The problem is: How can we garuantee a client application that all Animals will supply (in some way) this static method.
[In this particular example the methods differ only in the information they return, but the solution should allow the implementation of these methods to differ too].
Thanks for your thoughts.
JohnSenford [@hotmail.com]

Answer 1

interface Animal
class Dog implements Animal
     public static final String getType = "Doggy";
//    public static String getType()
//        return "Doggy";
class Cat implements Animal
      public static final String getType = "Kitty";
//    public static String getType()
//        return "Kitty";
or maybe an abstract base class;