Chris Pascoe’s Fun Tales

Cats! Love ’em or hate ’em, there is a historical precedent…

By the Middle Ages, cats were condemned as pagan symbols

In my column a couple of weeks back (the one in which I had a go at elves), I promised to investigate exactly why our modern-day furry friends, cats, were so hated and vilified in the Ancient World.

So, my investigations complete, I can now report back to you. In the annals of history, things actually started out pretty well for cats – mainly because the Ancient Egyptians thought they were gods. Quite how the Egyptians assumed a creature that spends half its waking hours washing itself with its tongue and eating next door’s flowers, was a god, I have no idea, but they most certainly did. They worshipped them, pampered them and put up with all their cute little habits – I mean, let’s face it, you’re not going to rub a god’s nose in its own urine because it’s peed on your kitchen floor, are you?

When a cat shuffled off the mortal coil in Ancient Egypt, the devotion didn’t end – they were treated the same way as Pharaohs, being mummified and given their own tombs, complete with mummified mice for afterlife snacking.

Believe it or not, it was the Egyptians’ unconditional love of all things feline that caused cats their first historical problems. The Egyptians’ enemies were no doubt just as bemused as we are by their adversaries’ worship of small pointy-eared animals. They could see ways of using this collective madness to their advantage though.

The Egyptians were a powerful fighting force, protected by mighty city walls – often unbeatable unless… you kidnap their cats. One particular army did exactly that – rounding up all the local felines outside the city walls and threatening to hurl them over said walls unless the Egyptians surrendered.

The Egyptians had a quick think, then threw open the city gates, risking their lives to prevent cats being thrown over a wall. Silly on so many levels – especially as the cats would’ve no doubt landed on all four feet and wandered off in a huff.

Moving forward in time, ancient Britons had a very different attitude to cats. They hated them. I personally find this even harder to believe than the Egyptian attitude, but by the Middle Ages the Christian Church had condemned the species as pagan symbols, causing cats to become almost extinct in Britain in the early 15th century.

The cats’ revenge was not being around to hunt rats for them – a big problem for food stocks, and also those very rats may well have been the carriers of Bubonic Plague. Way to go, cats – that taught them! Because of all this, the cats again landed on their feet, and today rule the very homes they were banished from.

This shows that a famous utterance by Abba Eban still stands true: Historyteachesus that men will behave wisely once they have exhausted all other alternatives.