WaPo’s Guide To Taking Better Photos Of Your Cat, PLUS: Snopes Weighs In On Cats And Bubonic Plague

A historian casts doubt on tales of widespread cat purging, tracing the origin of the claims to a novel published in the 1990s.

The Washington Post has a new guide for taking better photos of cats and dogs with some solid advice for people using smartphones as well as more traditional cameras.

The article is in front of the paywall so you don’t need a subscription to view it, and it emphasizes a few major points I’ve often written about when people ask me how I’ve been able to get certain shots of Bud:

  • Always let your cat get used to the camera, whether she sniffs it, head butts it or just wants to see it up close. Let her check it out and lose interest and then it becomes just another thing, allowing you to begin capturing more candid-style photos.
  • Bribe ’em: Your cat’s a model and deserves compensation. A few treats will keep him hanging around and happy as you snap away.
  • Pay attention to the lighting, especially if you’re shooting a black cat or a kitty with a darker coat pattern. Unless you’re going for a silhouette or a sunrise behind your furry friend, keep your cat facing to the right or left of the primary light source so you’re getting light and shadow to put those feline features in relief. It’s also worth taking a close look at how professional photographers shoot melanistic jaguars and leopards, carefully using light to highlight their features. In the right conditions their rosettes are still visible, they’re just slightly different shades of black. While house cats don’t have rosettes, the same attention to light and detail can help pick out the contours of their beautiful coats.
Black jaguar at Edin Zoo
Under the right light conditions, the contours, spots and rosettes of a black jaguar are visible in beautiful detail. Credit: Edin Zoo/Wikimedia Commons

Did People Really Slaughter Cats During The Plague?

It’s often claimed that Europeans murdered felines en masse during the waves of Black Plague that devastated Europe during the Dark Ages, visiting countless cruelties on cats while inadvertently amplifying the spread by nearly wiping out disease-carrying rodents’ most effective predators.

In a new post that closely examines documents and evidence from burial sites of the era, Snopes concludes there was much less cat-killing than claimed, and the claims of widespread purging at the hands of pandemic-weary zealots have their roots in a 90s novel, which was then circulated on the web as fact.

Sites where as many as 79 sets of cat bones from the era were found show clear signs that the animals were slaughtered for their fur, and a singular slaughter in 1730s Paris often cited as proof is not only a few centuries off but was also motivated by class hatred, not fears of the plague.

While the papal bull Vox In Rama was real, and a famously zealous inquisitor really did make the preposterous claim that Satanists had a ritual that involved literally kissing the asses of black cats, the pope never called on anyone to kill felines and there’s no evidence that people took it upon themselves to do so. There was plenty of other unbelievable superstitious idiocy that led to the deaths of animals at the time, including the practice of putting animals on trial for alleged crimes, but Europeans weren’t rampaging through towns and killing cats.

Snopes quotes Welsh historian Mike Dash, who says the modern claims of widespread cat-killing are “almost certainly a modern internet-based fabrication.”

14 thoughts on “WaPo’s Guide To Taking Better Photos Of Your Cat, PLUS: Snopes Weighs In On Cats And Bubonic Plague”

  1. Thank you for pointing readers to the Snopes story about the supposed mass slaughter of cats during the plague. Serious scholars have known for years that this is absurd; for some reason we want to think that people in the middle ages were outrageously stupid and cruel. Whenever I see this myth repeated in memes and factoids, I want to scream.

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  2. Just because they found only 79 sets of cat bones does not mean there was no mass murder of cats. Did these idiots look in waters of areas and other places? Not one minute i believe it was a fabrication. There are decades old books and diaries about mass killing of cats during the plague.

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  4. Bella does not like having her picture taken as her identity as a secret Mi5 agent must remain confidential… seriously though she photographs beautifully due to her sea-green eyes. We have a memorial book for our beautiful Bets along with memorial items in a room in our house which is full of photos. I can’t stop taking them now as I know they can leave us any days. Regarding the horror of killing cats in Europe, I desperately want to believe it was NOT true but given Human cruelty I am unsure. Have you seen this – literally made me cry and hold Bella close https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fp1szuqbtjf141.jpg

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    1. Oh man I can’t with those cartoons. They’re beautiful and poignant but I’m like you, they make me tear up and look for Bud to give him a hug, and then he’s all “What’s gotten into you, human? Snuggles are for later tonight when you sit on the couch and not before!”

      The artist/writer is extremely talented and has a direct line to the emotional wire between us and our beloved overlords, that’s for sure.

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  5. When it comes to getting the right light to photograph my shimmering black beauties, I’m the world’s worst. My room light isn’t good and the cats seek full sunpuddle blasts from windows. Still, I get pictures I treasure as family snapshots. Re: the Snopes article, history is always a matter of opinion. Is the title premise that the cat persecution wasn’t enough to impact plague spread, or what!? My impression that it was widespread came from reading 80’s books, and other general knowledge, before I was on the Internet. I decided not to speak of these horrors, but they weren’t for the purpose of obtaining fur; and the evidence would have to be anecdotal. At least one well known event was cited. Authors may be Roger Caras, Barbara Holland, others. Don’t have access to the books at this time to cite specifics. Sorry about the long post.

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    1. Your posts are always welcome, Leah. This isn’t the first time I’ve read skeptical responses to the cat purging claims, and I’ve read that the inquisitor who invented the feline posterior-kissing was especially prone to flights of fancy, which I think you’d have to be in order to torture and burn people for a living because you think they’re heretics.

      I realize Snopes has its critics and there are good reasons for that, as the fact-checking industry has waded into waters it really shouldn’t in the past by trying to quantify subjective things, but this article was carefully worded to underline that the evidence we’ve found doesn’t support the stories that are popular online.

      Of course that doesn’t mean it never happened, or that it didn’t happen on a smaller scale, just that there’s context.

      I agree with you, re: history and opinion. One of my favorite topics is classical Greece, and I’ve spent quite a bit of time over the years reading ancient and modern books on topics like the Peloponesian War, post-war Spartan hegemony, Thebes and Epaminondas, the battles of Thermopylae and Plataea, the Messenian helots, Athenian politics and so on…and it’s amazing how much disagreement there is among scholars over relatively minor issues.

      Imagine being a historian 1,000 or 2,000 years from now and trying to make sense of our time.

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      1. I wish i could find some of my work from high school. From the 1970’s. I got a A+. on this subject and Egypt. I spent weeks in the in the library. Loved it there.What comes to mind were the childrens accounts of what they did to cats. Pets they loved. Very sad. Sea of dead cats was one phrase. They were killed in every way you can think of. Mostly drowned so no one would find mass graves in the waters. Millions of feral cats will be killed in New Zealand and Austrailia. Just wait.

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    2. Yes Leah. I will read a book on a subject like this before i go to internet. They were cruel then and the cruelty will continue. Did people forget Austraila and New Zealand want to kill MILLIONS of feral cats? Do people think outrage over this will stop that? Poison is used a lot, too.

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      1. Gilda I was thinking of the known horrible thing that happened at the 1677 coronation of Elizabeth the First in England. And also wondering how conclusions could be drawn by examining burials only when there is abuse that AFAIK, leaves no evidence, or a different sort of evidence. Humans sure have a terrible record of mistreating animals, and each other.

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  6. Ahaha I’ve wondered how historians will write of our time too. One thing I forget to say is that though The Cathars is no doubt a novel, the Classical Cats book by Donald Engels, mentioned in the Snopes article, was a history, and it appeared to be well- researched. Of course, any history can have a “spin”. I have all those books somewhere but can’t get to them at the moment.

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