HISTORY, ETC: DEATH TO HAMSTERS!

Hong Kong's cull of thousands of cute rodents raises big historical questions about the relationship between people, pets and plague

Note to readers: This is a free post from History, Etc. If you’d like to receive more content, including subscriber-only articles, Q&As, podcast episodes, giveaways and more, please sign up here. Paid subscriptions keep this newsletter going!

If you’re already a subscriber, thank you. Enjoy the read.

---

Years from now, when the first great history of the Covid pandemic is written, its index may contain a reference, catalogued under the letter H, to the Hong Kong Hamster Cull (Jan. 2022).

Of course, this will be a passing reference, perhaps no more than a footnote. Given the human death toll the pandemic has wrought, and the disruption to the global economy and geopolitics, the fact that last week Hong Kong’s authorities ordered the deaths of two thousand rodents linked to a Covid outbreak in a pet shop may seem trivial. 

But if I were writing the history, I would mention it. There is pathos - or bathos - to be found in observing that a plague which began with bats in Wuhan eventually found its way to hamsters in Hong Kong. There is the opportunity to crack cheap jokes about the hamster-wheel of fortune. If nothing else, it shows that history has a sick sense of humour.

Yet there is a serious point, too. Although in many ways the global experience of Covid has been shaped by very twenty-first century factors - communications technology and its potential to distance, control and connect, global networks, medical science, a generalised obsession with data and statistics, etc - there have been certain aspects to the pandemic that are as old as the hills.

#hamstergate ought to remind us that, since the dawn of history, humans and animals have been connected on many levels. As well as depending on animals for companionship, work and food, we share diseases with them. And from time to time, the diseases we share can change the world.

I was thinking about the plight of Hong Kong’s hamsters last week when a question on the History, Etc weekly Q&A thread caught my eye.

I keep hearing this nugget: ‘the Pope ordered killing all the cats pre-1347; that's why the rat population exploded resulting in the Black Death.’ I call BS and that no such order ever happened. Am I right?  - CJ Johnson

This is a very good question. It helps us think about human-animal disease vectors, and their relationship with other factors that can shape pandemics. It also encourages us to ask questions about how history works - and to what extent one single event or decision can really have far-reaching consequences.

To begin with, let’s deal with the story CJ references. It does have some, very limited, basis in fact.

The medieval Pope who is commonly credited with having ordered a cat-cull is Gregory IX (r.1227-41). Gregory was one of several militant pontiffs of the early thirteenth century who were obsessed with enforcing papal supremacy and stamping out heresy. Six years into his pontificate Gregory issued a bull known as Vox in Rama, which called on German bishops to support the work of an enthusiastic papal inquisitor named Conrad of Magdeburg.

This is the bull that mentioned cats - although to read it now, cats are not really the first thing that leaps from its text. Using torture, Conrad had forced suspected heretics to admit to taking part in satanic ceremonies, where magic and bestiality entwined. Based on Conrad’s findings, Gregory’s bull alleged that German heretics lounged around at banquets, where they would encourage one another to lick and snog toads, before kissing the arse of a diabolical black cat with a stiff tail, and swearing to obey the commands of Satan. Then - this being a cult - they would all fall about rutting - men on women, men on men, women on women.

In Vox in Rama, Gregory declared himself to be quite appalled by all this - although not so appalled that he could resist describing it in lurid detail. And he granted crusade privileges to anyone who would ‘arm themselves for the eradication of these heretics’.

Pope Gregory IX, scourge of heretics (Getty Images)

What then, does this have to do with the Black Death, the late-medieval plague that killed between 40% and 60% of Europe’s population? The answer is: not much. The theory goes that because cats were suppressed on the eve of the Black Death, rats thrived, to the point where there were so many that a plague pandemic, spread by rat-fleas to humans, was all but assured.

But none of this really makes sense.

For a start, the dates are wrong. Gregory IX was pope from 1227 to 1241; he issued Vox in Rama in 1233. The first recorded cases of the Black Death spread from the Black Sea port of Caffa to Italy in 1347. To think that a policy set 114 years before the pandemic could be a critical factor in unleashing it is a stretch, to say the least.

Secondly, there is no good reason to think that Gregory did establish a policy of cat-killing. Vox in Rama does not demand a cull of cats. It orders the destruction of people. It may - or may not - have coined a dim sort of cultural suspicion of cats due to their connection in popular lore with witchcraft. But there is nothing in the text itself that implies a papal anti-cat policy of the sort that would deplete cat numbers on the scale required by the rat-boom theory.

Thirdly, to think that Gregory’s very broad anti-feline position led directly to the Black Death assumes an epidemiological model in which the main limiting factor on the spread of plague was the ability of cats to control rat numbers across entire regions. We only need think about this for a couple of seconds to realise that life is a lot more complicated than that.

The truth is that there is no good evidence for a papal-sponsored cat cull and that even if there were, it is hard to believe that this would have tipped the medieval world over into full-blown pandemic. To buy into that sort of theory requires us to reason like conspiracy theorists, not historians: to think in blinkered, narrow chains of reasoning, in which all events have a single cause, and in which those causes are often the least probable. Or to put it another way, CJ is right.

But back to hamsters.

A late-medieval cat, by Hieronymus Bosch (Getty Images)

The Hong Kong authorities ordered a hamster cull last week because they are concerned that hamsters can catch Covid and spread it to humans. This is not a totally random fear. In fact, it is perfectly justified. Even putting Covid aside for a moment, we know from bird flu, swine flu, Aids and foot-and-mouth that diseases can and do jump species, and that in the worst instances, this can be disastrous.

I have a theory - mostly un-evidenced, but deriving from a strong hunch - that the Black Death’s rapid and lethal spread in the fourteenth century was the result of a double mutation in the plague, which meant it could a) spread rapidly from human to human on the breath without the need for fleas on rats as essential intermediary hosts and b) spread back and forth between people and animals.

Almost every major source about the Black Death describes how, as well as the atrocious human death toll, there was mass mortality among dogs, cats and birds. That is why I suspect that the Black Death was an apocalyptically mutated form of plague which developed the ability to jump easily between species as well as human to human on the breath. I also suspect this was the perfect combination of mutations to allow plague to rip through a western society in which humans were generally in close proximity with animals and each other.

Which of course is key. A booming population, urbanisation, and globalisation - all of which were in full swing in the early fourteenth century - gave that new plague form a platform to thrive. And, with its critical mutations, thrive it did. There has been no worse pandemic in all of recorded history - and let us hope that in our lifetime and our children’s, there never is.

But that platform was critical. Far more important, probably, than anything else. Whatever the origin story of Wuhan Covid,and its wicked means of infecting and killing people, ask yourself: could it have spread in a world without the rapid, mass travel and trade networks and the dense population patterns we have today? No. The same thinking has to apply to the Black Death. If the arrival and explosion of the Black Death had anything to do with animals, it was not cat population statistics and rat population statistics that made the vital difference. It was the broader context of a society that was over-populated and over-networked relative to its medical technology. But that’s a much bigger story.

Fifteenth-century Sicilian fresco illustrating the triumph of death (Getty Images)

All of which leaves rather a higgledy-piggledy set of conclusions. The Hong Kong authorities are probably right to worry about diseased hamsters, but really ought to be more worried how they’ll ever get out of the nightmare of a Zero Covid policy that makes a return to the real world impossible.

Meanwhile, medieval popes didn’t cull cats, but arguably should have, along with lots of other animals, about one hundred years after they did - or didn’t.

And history, as always, is both fiendishly complicated and knock-you-over-the-head simple. Which is why we love it. Isn’t it?

---

Thanks for reading this free post from History, Etc. If you’d like to receive more content, including subscriber-only articles, Q&As, podcast episodes, giveaways and more, please sign up here.

If you’re already a subscriber, thank you!