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The Cat and the Law

Chapter Six. The Cat and the Law. Van Vechten, Carl. 1922. The Tiger in the House the epoch of the cat’s godhood down to the modern moment laws have been passed to protect the cat, laws which have demanded that man treat the cat in such and such a fashion. Egyptians cat-killers were punished by death. Diodorus writes of a brave Roman soldier who was the victim of this law. It is interesting to compare this extreme measure with the old English common law which held both cats and dogs as “no property, being base by nature,” but it is also well to remember that at one time in England larceny was punished by the death penalty. If a cat had been considered property the theft of a puss would have led the thief to the block or the scaffold. The English “Rule of Nuns” issued in the early thirteenth century, forbade the holy women to keep any beast but a cat. A canon of a date nearly a hundred years earlier forbade nuns, even abbesses, from wearing costlier skins than those of lambs and cats. The Welsh laws concerning domestic lions were formulated in the tenth century. In 1818 a decree was issued at Ypres in Flanders forbidding the throwing of pussies from high towers in commemoration of a Christmas Spectacle. And today the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals endeavours to make the punishment fit the crime for anyone who maliciously mistreats a cat.

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