Cat Killings Worsened Plague Spread

Black cats were described as proxies or representations of Satan in alleged Luciferian rituals in the papal bull Vox in Rama, issued by medieval pope Gregory IX in the 1230s. Although Gregory never explicitly ordered their destruction, the decree helped vilify black cats, and several decades of killing followed. The resulting decline in cats allowed Europe's rat population to grow and may have worsened the spread of the Black Death more than a century later.

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