Cast your mind back to 2020, because chances are you’ve repressed it. There’s a novel coronavirus on the loose and millions of people are locked down in their homes. Some have been furloughed, others sacked. Everyone’s life plans, from holidays, weddings and trying for a baby, to house moves, funerals and exams, are cancelled. The feverish languish in their beds, and the healthy wonder when they’ll succumb. In the absence of air traffic, the birdsong is insanely loud, and punctuated by sirens. In the streets, people yell at each other for getting too close, and loitering with a coffee in a park might get you reprimanded through a megaphone. In the space of a few short weeks, the world is unrecognisable, and it would all be a bit comical if it wasn’t so scary and sad. Yet little did you or I know that – according to the former health minister Lord Bethell – behind closed doors, the government was considering whether or not to mass murder our cats.
I adopted my cat – then a six-week-old kitten – in May 2020. There was a question mark then over whether cats could catch Covid. We know now that it can happen, but rarely and only in a very mild form – although the author Patricia Lockwood noted when hers caught it that it could have some rather dramatic gastric symptoms that don’t bear thinking about. Amid the panic about the spread of the virus, we now know that the government thought a possible solution might be a mass slaughter of the nation’s moggies. Why dogs got a free pass, we shall never know.
I remember, before bringing Mackerel home, slightly anxiously reading the guidelines around the virus and pets. There were strict instructions about not kissing your cat. How we laughed, because what kind of loser has an urge to do that? Said mirth lasted until the moment I met her, when I realised instantly how much I wanted to press my lips to the little white starburst on her forehead. I had fallen in love. Either that, or I had toxoplasmosis.
As I am sure is the case with many “crazy cat ladies” – as we have so rudely been labelled historically – and their brothers in arms, the thought of having to put down our pets in any circumstances other than to relieve them from extreme suffering feels heartbreaking to contemplate. Even when they are suffering, it is devastating: when Ernest Hemingway had to dispatch his cat Uncle Willie, he wrote in a letter: “Have had to shoot people but never anyone I knew and loved for 11 years. Nor anyone that purred with two broken legs.”
Had the government announced a feline cull, I would have strongly considered direct action, or at the very least would have barricaded all the doors and windows with a view to defending her with all the means at my disposal. We all were forced to make sacrifices for the greater human good, but the mass slaughter of innocent animals would have been beyond the pale. We are a nation of animal lovers, sometimes at the expense of our humanity. My French friend blames it on the fact that so many of our children’s books are anthropomorphic.
Then again, scarcely anything in life has made me as content as being owned by that kitten. As I write in my book, The Year of the Cat, there were times during that strange, sad year when it felt as though that kitten was the only thing standing between me and a complete breakdown. There was one particular week when I could no longer get out of bed, and Mackerel came and lay down next to me, purring. I choose to believe that she knew I needed comfort, but it’s true that she could have simply been plotting to eat my corpse.
Some believe that the British public may be inclined to forget the unnecessary deaths of so many of their fellow humans once they are in the privacy of the polling booth, but a cat cull? Surely that would have been electoral suicide for the Tories. (Just remember the fury over the woman who put that one in the wheelie bin.) Thankfully, I was never put in a position to have to choose, as cats never posed much of a risk to us.
Yet I almost wrote this lying down, despite having a bad back, because the cat was sleeping on the office chair and I didn’t want to move her. In the end I bribed her with Dreamies, but it wouldn’t be the first time I’d risked my own health for hers – how many bladder infections, I wonder, are caused in nap-trapped cat owners? Ultimately, we all know that felines rule the world. Blame toxoplasmosis, I guess.
Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett is a Guardian columnist
