Note: Oops, I left this in my drafts by accident lat night so you’ll get two blog posts today!
I finally watched Inside of the Mind of a Cat on Netflix, the documentary from last year that is stuffed with adorable cats, easy-to-understand science, and a couple of surprising (or surprising to me) new tidbits.
One, which may very well may not be true after Cara did some internet research, was that the Rouge Pope’s order to murder cats may have caused the Black Dlague.
Okay, part of that seems to be true. The Rouge Pope, Gregory IX, apparently put out an order that good Catholics should kill any cats they see. Cats were associated with witches, who were women who wanted to keep a clean house so used brooms to sweep and cats to kill rodents. So, for a while, Catholics went after cats and killed them in grotesque ways. The documentary mentioned that some people believed that because the cat population was decimated the rodent population ran rampant, as did the fleas on their backs that carried the Bubonic plague. That last part may not be true, as there was a century gap between this cat-killing order and the Black Plague . . . and that cats also carry fleas.
But I’m no expert. It may be worth a google yourself. Also you should probably read this article that, among other things, describes this truly wild ritual that the Grand Inquistior of the German Inquistion reported on satanic cults permoring (but most likely he just made it up) that involves kissing cats on the buttocks and linking cats to witchcraft and satanism.
The documentary is well worth the watch though, especially if you have your own cats nearby — it brings a new appreciation to their evolutionary design, their intelligence, and ultimately their social bonds with humans.
With Love,
Natalie