Sometimes, in witch trial cases, a cat would show up and people would start to have trouble breathing. But there are some strange things they do to us that, maybe, could have been confused with witchcraft back in pre-Enlightenment times. Explain what science is telling us about cats’ demonic mischief.Ĭats are elegant, wonderful, amazing animals. Historically, cats have been accused of everything from killing babies to bewitching people, but there may be more science to those fantasies than we once thought. That tension between public passion and private violence reminds me of the Egyptians. But in America today about two million healthy house cats are euthanized per year because we don’t have a solution for what to do with them. We love cats and have a worshipful attitude towards them. You see a similar thing in modern culture. So the culture was simultaneously engaged in adoring house cats and throttling them behind closed doors. Some people have suggested it was a form of humane population control.
And it seems they were also killing the cats in an organized way. Priests raised large quantities of house pets. The catteries at the temples of Bastet are our first efforts at raising cats in a manner of animal husbandry. So over time, the domestic cat became more important. She began her divine tenure at a time when farming intensified and environmental degradation increased. Tell us about the Egyptian goddess Bastet and how she relates to modern cat domesticity.īastet was an Egyptian goddess with the head of a cat, who became supremely important in late Egypt. Our domestic relationship with cats goes back thousands of years and seems to be linked inextricably with our worship of them. Watch what scientists discovered when they placed GPS tracking devices on house cats.