Why Cats Were Hated in Medieval Europe | Hacker News Reader

Why Cats Were Hated in Medieval Europe

medievalists.net

89 pointsdiodorus78 comments

"according to medieval writers and other accounts"

I don't see mentioned anywhere in the page that taking accounts written in middle ages is going to incur serious bias and how author corrected for it.

not many were able to write and chances are if you were one of those you had a lifestyle that involved far less plowing.

anyway, same sources different conclusions https://medievalisterrant.wordpress.com/2013/04/02/cats-as-p...

witchcraft at that time was the terrorist of modern ages, anyone could be it, and dog were counted as familiar as much as cats. if you lived closed to a city, it was a dangerous proposition, but then even floating on water was a 'proof' - sure you didn't want to be caught in the fisher nets and burned at a stake, but I don't see much of the rural population going off without cats - that is, if they wanted to survive winters.

sadly it seems there are very few studies based on more than writing (i.e. bones - https://www.academia.edu/1061079/LUFF_R._M._MORENO-GARC%C3%8... )

bottom line: there is quite a disconnect between what they were writing and what they were doing.

Sadly this is often the way with studying the medieval period, when records were sparse, and most people couldn't write. My guess is they didn't explicitly state it because as a magazine for medievalists their readership is going to implicitly understand that written accounts can't be taken as the opinion of everyone.

Having said that, it appears cats weren't universally hated, a quick Google reveals this blog post[1] about cats and their relationship with scribes. It seems that there was a similar feel to many modern cat owners, the well known affection for an animal that will not be told what to do.

"it appears cats weren't universally hated, a quick Google reveals"

Or you could copy&paste from the linked-to article:

> Not all medieval Europeans hated cats. There are many accounts of cats being kept as pets, including by nuns.

As a former falculty memeber and Theological Seminary student. Academia has a serious issue with quality scholarship. Most people focus on one thing and make bold unsupported grabs.

My cool little twist on everyone else (I was into Historical Theology which is the most geeky of Theological disciplines) I liked to show the art of whatever period I was talking about. It would debunk 50% of the crappy research all the time, and this time it didn't fail.

Warning slide show for ads but it is a slide show of cats in the Middle Ages.

http://www.medievalists.net/2015/08/08/cat-pics-from-the-mid...

Cats as pets, guardians against mice, etc.

This myth started about cats because people thought Middle Age people were stupid and that they got the wrong idea about cats and that killed them because then the plague came. If the stupid people just had cats no plague.

>This myth started about cats because people thought Middle Age people were stupid and that they got the wrong idea about cats and that killed them because then the plague came. If the stupid people just had cats no plague.

Monty Python took this mindset to comedic extreme with the "bring out your dead" scene in "Quest for the Holy Grail"; the medieval peasants are literally depicted as belly-crawling through the muddy streets. It's when speaking with average progressives about the past that this skit truly comes into its own, though; the average "modern" really has internalized such defamation about the past. One can see the comedy in their historical exaggerations even if they cannot.

Apropos to the subject; in the background of that very scene is an old woman flogging a cat against a wall[1]. The depth of thought and detail that the Monty Python lads show in their historical understanding is quite impressive.

[1] https://youtu.be/grbSQ6O6kbs?t=52 EDIT: add url

I sent this article to my wife, who is doing a PhD in medieval history, specifically looking at women who've taken religious vows, and she had this to say:

"Cats weren't just popular with nuns, but particularly with anchoresses [effectively female hermits]. Which I suppose makes sense because you'd want the company! The 13th century rule for anchoresses 'Ancrene Wisse' forbids all pets except a cat. So they can't have been considered that demonic "

Amazing. Apparently crazy cat ladies have been a feature of western civilization for a lot longer than I realized.

The companion meme came later, I think. The first references to black cats I've seen (you can see a taste of this if you read Name of the Rose) were of superstitions positive and negative) regarding path crossing and sacrificing of black cats. But by the time witch hunts rolled around, they definitely used "familiars" as evidence in some cases.

I wonder if the "cat ladies" were a part of this, and if there were "cat men" for monks.

Wow. Please send more HN articles to your wife! Even better, convince her to comment here.

Why hello.

One of my favourite types of humour is the unexpected development.

This made me LOL. Would that I could upvote more than once.

The blog post is a good one, but is unrelated to your point about witch hunts, which really weren't much of a thing until the early modern period.

Also, accounts written at any time incur bias - all sources are fallible, and medieval ones arguably no more so than any others.

Eastern Europe (starting with Poland) had different attitudes, there were very few witch hunts in medieval Poland (mostly they happened later, in protestant parts), and cats weren't persecuted. Catholicism in general wasn't very fond of witch hunts (it was forbidden by priests most of the time, because "spells doesn't work, there's just one God"), they were hard on the heretics instead.

Some people attribute this (big amount of cats) as one of the reasons Poland went through black death relatively unharmed (also the mostly rural population, of course).

"they were hard on the heretics instead" - I can't recall any significant harm done to heretics in Poland, quite contrary: it was considered safe haven for the heretics from neighbor countries.

That part I meant as for Catholicism in general. The only heretics persecution in Poland I can remember was Arian brothers expulsion.

Well, they say that if you die alone with your dogs, they'll guard your body. But cats, they'll just eat it ;) In fact, your dogs will too, if they get hungry enough. But they'll be guilty about it, for whatever that's worth.

Cats are obligate carnivores, generally they will eat flesh and that's it. They are also usually smaller, a smaller body means running out of resources faster. Dogs are a bit more omnivorous than cats.

So in the situation where they are trapped with the owner's body, a cat runs out of options faster than a dog. A dog will chow down on house plants, fruit.. or anything it can in extremis. A cat rather more quickly finds itself in the "eat this body or die" circumstance.

Human beings will, too, in extreme circumstances:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1972_Andes_flight_disaster

If people don't have any other food, they will eat people who die as well.

Link-bait-y and extremely poorly argumented.

tl;dr - Author claims medieval Europe hates cat. Author picks and chooses examples of people in medieval Europe that wrote bad things about cats. In the last paragraph, Author summarizes and downplays evidence of people liking cats in medieval Europe.

The part where they said Muslims liked cats while Christians liked dogs is interesting. I wonder if this is still a bit true.

Dogs are unclean in Islam. It's not haraam to own dogs, but many Muslims don't touch dogs.

It's not really a stretch to label "unclean" an animal that eats its own feces.

I feel like this is some kind of meta comment about the tech industry :-)

Makes you wonder about the contents of dogfood ;).

Like rabbits?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabbit#Diet_and_eating_habits

Yes, like rabbits. Horses, too.

The health implications aren't as bad with herbivores

Um, yeah I suppose that's one way of way saying. In actually, the health implications are good for herbivores AND other less efficient digestive systems like those in the rodent family.

The prove that there is no intelligent designer ;)

Corprophagia is actually a pretty effective method our keeping a litter clean. A nursing dog will stimulate her puppies to defecate and if she can't carry the stools away from the litter she will eat them. Canine gastric acidity can drop below pH 1 to handle this.

The behaviour might be hygienic for the dog, but not for the humans interacting with it.

i also wonder if muslim countries suffered significantly less from the plague.

edit:

according to wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Death#Recurrence), that's not the case:

> The Black Death ravaged much of the Islamic world.[91] Plague was present in at least one location in the Islamic world virtually every year between 1500 and 1850.[92] Plague repeatedly struck the cities of North Africa. Algiers lost 30 to 50 thousand inhabitants to it in 1620–21, and again in 1654–57, 1665, 1691, and 1740–42.[93] Plague remained a major event in Ottoman society until the second quarter of the 19th century. Between 1701 and 1750, thirty-seven larger and smaller epidemics were recorded in Constantinople, and an additional thirty-one between 1751 and 1800.[94] Baghdad has suffered severely from visitations of the plague, and sometimes two-thirds of its population has been wiped out.[95]

I remember reading about a village that actually brought in large numbers of cats to deal with their rat problem, believing that the rats were spreading the plague. The cats did a fairly successful job of killing the rats off and, as a result, they had a huge plague outbreak. The scholars at the time concluded that the rats and the plague were unrelated.

With the benefit of hindsight, we know that the plague is spread by Yersinia Pestis, which is carried by rats and transmitted to humans through fleas. The fleas generally prefer the taste of rat blood and only bite humans when they get really hungry. Of course, when a bunch of cats kill the rats, they have to make do with what's available and the fleas start going after people, vomiting the bacteria trapped within their gut into the human blood stream, spreading the plague.

The total rule against dogs is a relatively modern interpretation in islam. It isn't even to do with the dogs themselves, but that most dogs were smelly and unclean creatures. There is plenty of evidence that the ban really only applied to mongrels, unclean street dogs. Working dogs (hunting/herding/guarding) particularly those similar to salukis, were not considered unclean and were kept. The Quran specifically states that animals caught by trained hunting dog may be eaten (005:004) with the necessary implication that they may be kept and trained.

The fear of black dogs is very much ingrained in many Muslim countries. But that tradition predates islam altogether and is widespread even in the west (black dogs are far less likely to be adopted).

Well i'll take em.

How can someone say no to this? https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b8/BlackLab...

And I'll take the black cats, which are also less likely to be adopted. To make up for that, August 17 is Black Cat Appreciation Day! [1] [2]

#BlackCatsMatter #BlackDogsMatter

[1] https://www.aspca.org/blog/celebrate-black-cat-appreciation-...

[2] https://www.daysoftheyear.com/days/black-cat-appreciation-da...

> #BlackCatsMatter #BlackDogsMatter

Do you realise how tone deaf you sound here?

No, please educate me. Should I have said #AllCatsMatter #AllDogsMatter ?

Why the hissy fit? Are you accusing me of dog-whistle politics?

Does this make you feel better? [1] [2]

[1] https://www.pinterest.com/foundanimals/black-dog-appreciatio...

[2] https://www.facebook.com/BlackDogAppreciationDayBlackDogWalk

The objection is to your making light of protests focused on people being executed in the streets by their government because of their skin color.

So do you believe that by discussing black dogs and cats being executed in animal shelters, I'm taking away from the focus on people being shot in the streets? Do you think I'm only capable of being concerned about one problem at a time, and I shouldn't care about black dogs and cats until all of our world's other problems are solved?

You know there's a "Black Lives Matter" slogan, right?

Feel free to talk about the death of animals - it's an important topic - but linking your campaign the the murder of humans by police officers is, and I say this as politely as I can, fucking stupid.

Are you aware that you sound like a right wing concern troll trying to make #BlackLivesMatter activists sound stupid?

I doubt it, and neither am I.

I also thought your initial use of the hashtags to be in poor taste.

I actually find all uses of #-delineated keywords on Hacker News to be in poor taste. HN is not Twitter. It does not turn hashtags into clickable links.

Until such automatic-linking support exists, as with HTTP URLs, it would probably be better to paste an HTTP URL for twitter.com that searches for the most recent tweets with the relevant hashtag word or phrase. That also removes the personal connection to the keyword. Rather than promoting a given phrase yourself, you are pointing to a community that has elected to use it by consensus, as a reference that may be useful for further information on the topics introduced in your post.

Given the nature of hashtags, one person can hardly be held solely responsible for them. They aren't particularly useful unless a lot of people independently agree to use a particular word or phrase.

It has developed into a meme/style of speech. It's not purely a functional thing.

You're the one drawing equivalence between the death of pets and the murder of black people by police.

There is no law that we can't be concerned about animals lives until all people's lives are better.

You're missing the point. I don't care whether people campaign vigorously to prevent abuse and needless death of black animals.

But to use the line #blackdogsmatter, clearly derived from #blacklivesmatter, is idiotic.

So do you approve of using #BlackHolesMatter to protest the heat death of the universe, because it's a much bigger and longer term problem, which affects many more life forms than #BlackLivesMatter?

We have free speech and people can use whatever hashtags they want to. Outside of organizing a terrorist plot or conspiring to kill someone, people have the right to speak and write what they choose.

Your opinion. There are plenty of people who don't think #BlackCatsMatter is idiotic.

Save the animals - #AllLivesMatter

To be fair, these are real hashtags that real people use.

Some people are focused on living their lives, not tilting at every social justice windmill.

I promise you that the following is a true story.

When I was going to Michigan State University, my wife was getting a degree in Zoology. We're white, which is relevant to the story. As part of one of her classes or internships (can't recall which), she had to go speak to a school class about a topic in Zoology. At the time we had quite a few pets, including a black Labrador, and a white rat and a black rat, which she ended up bringing in as a way of engaging the students in the topic. The classroom was mostly African-American kids around the second grade, and the kids actually expressed amazement that the white woman had black pets.

I'm typing this at least ten years later and I still don't really know how to react.

Anyhow, point is, there's more here than you might think. For better or worse.

I don't know whether there has been a modern reinterpretation. The way i remember being taught in school, Muslims are allowed to keep dogs for hunting and guarding purposes, but we are not allowed to touch them (except perhaps on the head?), or let them into our houses.

Not sure what exactly has changed except perhaps we don't hunt much any more.

It's like the jewish rules about food. The evidence is that the original rules were probably much less strict, but over the years various scholars tighten some rules just to be on the safe side, or to see more devout than everyone else. So it will depend on which modern expert you talk to.

As far as I know, dogs are okay according to Quran but hadiths are against dogs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animals_in_Islam

If you read "The Innocents Abroad" by Mark Twain (written in ~1850 or so), he writes a lot about the bad treatment of dogs in Arab countries (or at least in Turkey).

"They feel after him and when they have found him they kiss him under the tail." - That is funny and gross, but still funny.

In terms of Medieval people hating cats, there was a proclamation from Pope Gregory the 9th in early 1200's where he issued a bull against a cult. This bull apparently included "When the meal had ended, the sect would arise and a statue of a black cat would come to life, walking backwards with its tail erect. First the new initiate and then the master of the sect would kiss the cat on the buttocks"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pope_Gregory_IX#Demonization_o...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vox_in_Rama

Although small house and ferile cats are obviously not lions, I imagine that there is at least some connection to the First Epistle of St. Peter, i.e. when it comes to perceived associations between cats and the devil:

"Be sober, be watchful. Your adversary the devil prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking some one to devour." - 1 Pet 5:8 (RSV)

https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1+Peter+5%3A8&v...

I hate cats now. They shit in the gardens of other people. I think they should be forbidden to walk freely outside.

To be fair, so do foxes.

As do humans.

Dude, where do you live?

Not a garden, but when I worked downtown, on my very last day at that job, I was waiting for the bus and got the pleasure of witnessing a homeless man walk up to the bus stop sign, pee on it, and walk away.

Guess it depends on where you live. We have had days where we couldn't sit in the garden due to the smell. Also I had to through away my home grown tomatoes because they were basically growing in cat-shit.

How's that any different than fertilizing them with, say, cow manure, which your store-bought organics might be using?

I'm not certain of the chemical composition of cat manure, maybe its nitrogen content is too high or it screws with the soil pH?

I not an expert on the science behind it, so please correct me without freaking out if I get some detail wrong... but herbivore' manure may be applied directly to the soil. Pet's (dogs and cats) manure must be composted first.

There are 2 plausible reasons why this may be so. The first is that large farm herbivore's (cows and horses mostly) are different enough from human beings that the diseases they carry cannot cross the species barriers so easily, not so with pets. Composting kills bacteria in at least 2 ways: it heats up and all but the thermophilic bacteria get killed, and competition from sturdier aerobic non-pathogenic bacteria in the compost pile drive off the rest after a couple dozen generations. This is specially important for dogs since we have been co-evolving to eat roughly the same foodstuffs for a couple million years. But I really don't see much of the same concerns for cats.

The other idea is that cat's feces are what gardeners call "hot" themselves. It has nothing to do with temperature, but with overly high nitrogen contents. I don't have a reference at hand, but the basics of compost chemistry say that nitrogen based substances react and break down cellulose in the plant derived parts of the compost pile, making the carbon in it usable by the lifeforms in the soil. This has the side effect of coupling the toxic nitro in the catalyst (urine and feces) with carbon atoms, changing it into non-toxic forms that are themselves usable by the lifeforms in the soil as well.

All organic food grows in shit. It's called manure. You probably bought some.

Carnivore feces are not considered to be advantageous for gardening and in the case of cat dumpings you also have the risk of toxoplasmosis to consider. Any manure you use for fertilizer should be well composted, as using fresh poop of any kind will tend to kill off your plants due to the high ammonia content and the heat of decomposition. Also, fresh herbivore poop tends to have undigested seeds in it which can lead to strange weeds in your flower beds.

Toxoplasmosis is dangerous to pregnant women, it is why they shouldn't do gardening for 9 months.

Good points, but none of this means that fruits grown in soil contaminated with cat poop must be destroyed. You just need to wash them.

I have two large dogs. When I was investigating the possibility of composting their waste, I ran across several sources that said even composted dog waste should only be used for ornamentals, not food plants. This may be out of an abundance of caution, but the idea is that plants drawing up nutrients and water from the soil can become contaminated with viable bacteria as well.

There is no evidence of the existence of cat/human diseases that can infect plants or plant diseases that can infect cats/humans. Plants and animals are enormously different biologically. A pathogen that has evolved to infect one is very unlikely to to be capable of infecting the other. It's just as likely as the existence of a nobel prize winning physicist who is also the heavyweight boxing champion of the world.

Dogs are worse in this regard. They take a bigger shit in the gardens of other people, they attack other people. I think they should be forbidden to walk freely outside.

Here at least dogs are not allowed to roam the streets freely + dog owner pay taxes (cat owners don't), which can be used to clean the streets.

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