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

Not really, because as you say, the compiler only knows that callFriend() is returning an Animal, not a Dog or Duck.

Can you not add an abstract makeNoise() method to Animal that would be implemented as a bark or quack by its subclasses?