How do I make the method return type generic?

Question

Consider this example (typical in OOP books):

I have an Animal class, where each Animal can have many friends.
And subclasses like

Answer 1

You could define callFriend this way:

public  T callFriend(String name, Class type) {
    return type.cast(friends.get(name));
}

Then call it as such:

jerry.callFriend("spike", Dog.class).bark();
jerry.callFriend("quacker", Duck.class).quack();

This code has the benefit of not generating any compiler warnings. Of course this is really just an updated version of casting from the pre-generic days and doesn't add any additional safety.