First, the meme:
...about when any good Catholic would take one for the team and die of plague in order to rid the world of Satan on paws....
The Beaubonic Plague, aka the Black Death, killed off fully 60% of Europe's population. No word on how many cats and cat owners were slaughtered.
Then there's this little fact check by Dr. Michael Fox, Animal Doctor and cat hater/nature lover:
"While rats and cats were blamed for the plague and killed in the Middle Ages, the disease mainly spread person to person via fleas and lice. But cats can transmit plague to humans by biting or scratching them. People can also be exposed to the illness through direct contact with an infected cat’s draining lymph node material. An infected cat may also carry fleas that can transmit plague to humans by biting them. If a cat has the pneumonia-causing form of plague, it can easily be spread to humans through the air. Owners and veterinarians are at risk of contracting plague when dealing with an infected cat."
....Which begs the question of whether scads of cats roaming the city streets of Europe would have lowered the rodent population sufficiently to low the flea population sufficiently to lower the plague-bacteria population sufficiently to have lowered mortality in humans. Ahem.
Or would people have simply continued exchanging their own cozy fleas and lice, with no need for that human-flea-and-lice population to have been replenished by the rats' (or cats') fleas and lice?
...Which is an illustration, people, of how the myth-plus-fact-check cycle does not necessarily lead to conclusive truths. My relatively uneducated guess would be that a rat population explosion would only have made matters worse--though people possibly had closer contact with the cats? Even so, I imagine "direct contact with an infected cat’s draining lymph node materia", as well as bitings and scratchings from cats, were relatively rare--as, in the old days, cats were not nearly so often beloved house pets as they were work animals on farms and around homes to keep rodent pests down--or they were simply feral. They certainly never SAW THE VET!
You see what I mean? Real life is murkier than a meme. How many times do I need to "imagine" and "guess" here? How am I to balance, exactly, pro- considerations with con- ones on this issue? Trust the experts? And if the experts disagree?
...Doing a casual google to explain the END of the Black Death, I find a theory, trending now, that voluntary quarantining did the trick. But I also find the fact that deadly pandemics kill off their hosts--and thereby extinguish themselves--being cited as the death-blow to the Death. Obviously, populations thinned via the elimination of 6 of every 10 persons, leaving the Death with fewer-and-farther-between targets. But which theory explains its disappearance the best?
To take another angle, the Plague shocked Europe into the Dark Ages, a time when the populace retreated into relatively isolated villages, an unintentional sort of quarantine making the exchange of pathogens, on a continental and even provincial level, certainly less efficient. This isolation occurred to the point where Europe's forests, which the previously thriving civilization had decimated, as thriving civilizations do, rebounded to once again cover the earth and screen off the sky. These historical facts would seem to support the idea of the Plague's own deadliness playing a part in killing it off.
On the other hand, historical reports of successful quarantine practices in Black-Plague Europe reveal that, despite the confusion which Satan and the Pope wrought upon them about the cause of the pandemic, and despite having no idea what that the infective agent, Yersinia pestis (or any bacterium or virus for that matter) even existed, Plague-era Europeans got hip to the fact that the disease was contagious. So, they invented quaranting--but was that enough to contribute, lastingly, to Y. pestis's demise? Discuss.
Some maverick historians, cutting against the grain of consensus, even dispute the seemingly solid rat-carrier theory, limiting the bacterium's transport to humans to the human-infesting flea known as Pulex irritans. Consensus says they needed the rodent vector to reach pandemic proportions, but consensus has said a lot of things in the history of scholarship. Consensus once adamantly (as in adamantium) held that dinosaurs were lounging, cold-blooded lizards rather than massive, active, warm-blooded avians.
But it seems obvious that Pulex irritans would merely irritate, whereas Y. pestis would induce pestilence, plague--I mean, look at their names.
...And so we swirly on down the rabbit hole, factoring in cats and rats and elephants, and perhaps a unicorn or two, and god (but not Pope Gregory) knows what else.
The fact is, in unraveling the truth of any issue, we are trying to do nothing less than form a cohesive, overall 3-D model that contains all the significant moving parts in their realistic balance. The trick is to have fun with that. It is doable, in many cases--as is juggling, a very similar exercise.
I could write a whole piece, I imagine, about why the cut-and-dried, one-sided truth of memes is so comforting and so popular (so viral, if you will)--but I think it boils down to how much time and effort it takes to weigh and balance the overall truth of many claims. It takes training and practice and access to good info. It takes, not just thinking, which is hard enough--but critical thinking, the kind of thinking that challenges every thought as it comes up, like an annoying nephew who's always asking why, why, WHY?!
It might just taking the reading of (a) book(s) on critical thinking, and--gulp!--taking notes. For a start.
I say the Black Plague was caused by pissed-off nature fairies, and the spell was broken when Pope Gregory IX boned the Queen of Italy in the middle of St. Peter's Square.
