Yep Gombe is that half-rabbit-half-cat-thingy they first met at the station with Kokoro and Chimney.
As for the cloud fox, in my country it´s name is "Shuu", but I didn´t wanna bother with romanization and translation problems, so I called him cloud fox.
My whole point being:
It would be much more surprising to have the sidecharacters in the arcs NOT have some kind of weird animal sidekick than to actually have them one.
Drinking duck - fox on clouds - horse with length of at least 5m ( metric system here, 5m should be around 15 feet ) - talking star fish.
Come on, it almost seems like he forces this animals down to us. much more so than it feels he always forces Luffy to fight the big player.