January 26, 2021 • 33 mins
Whether you love them or hate them, there's no denying that cats hold a unique position in human society. They're (in)famous for making their own way -- "I tolerate you," the cat seems to say to its owner, "but I do not need you." While modern civilization is pretty pro-cat, this wasn't always the case. In the first part of this series, the guys explore the waxing and waning reputation of felines throughout history, from ancient Egypt to the Middle Ages and beyond.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Ridiculous History is a production of I Heart Radio. Welcome
(00:27):
to the show Ridiculous Historians. As always, thank you so
much for tuning in. Today's episode is especially dedicated to
I Luri files a word I just learned that means
lover of cats. Ben, I thought you were about to
say a word I just made up, but it sounds
(00:47):
too fancy and science e for that to be the case.
I don't know this word either, Ben, Yeah, yeah, it's
uh a I l u r O file. Also a
cat fancier we've got. We've got a bunch of fans
of cats, dogs, pats, animals in general in the crowd
today and notes here uh that my pal Nolan I
(01:10):
are ourselves cat owners. So this will necessarily be a
two part episode. You know, there's always been this kind
of I would say, a false divide between dog lovers
and cat lovers. There are some people who feel like
those things are mutually exclusive, but nol I um. I
see it in some people, but usually I disagree. I think.
(01:33):
I think, especially the rise of the cat memes and
videos online, have have done a lot for the reputations
of our feline friends. What would you say I would
agree with that, and Ben, I was reminded just the
other day of a little brief period in cat internet
meme video culture where people were spooking their cats with cucumbers.
We can, guys remember this. That seemed to be a
(01:55):
very universal reaction. Cats would not not only gets spooked,
they would just jump straight up in the air. I'm
assuming that they thought it was a snake or something
like that. But uh yeah, I don't know why that
popped out from my my mental index the other day,
but I went and looked at like a nice super
cut of all of them, and then sure enough, every
single cat jumps straight up in the air. But it's true, Ben, cats,
the internet has really made cats kind of a universal thing,
(02:20):
whether it's like your grumpy cat, you're a little bub
remember a little Bub when we were in by Discovery
Channel because he was technically our our coworker. Yes. And
while you're on the Internet, by the way, you can
also go to t Public and check out our ridiculous
history swag featuring a T shirt with none other than
super producer Casey Pegram Casey I, I don't want people
(02:44):
to equate you with little Bub. We we make high
quality memes here at ridiculous history. Only the best memes here,
only the best. Yeah. For the longest time I thought
it was little bubbs, but is not plural. Who's just
a single bub um? But you know, the thing about
cats too is the expression in cats comes to mind
as possibly a good argument for why maybe cat shows
(03:05):
aren't as much of a thing as dog shows. Dogs
can be trained, they prance around on command. They're much
more beholden to their masters. Cats are kind of notoriously
fickle and kind of do whatever they want. And I'm
assuming there still are cat shows, but you don't really
hear about them in the same way as you would, like, say,
the Westminster dog show. But it turns out that there is.
We can pinpoint the world's very first cat show. Uh.
(03:29):
And it wasn't held in Westminster, mind you, but it
was held at the St Giles Fair in Winchester, also
in England. In it's true, uh, we we don't know
much about this first cat show other than that date.
In fact, some historians challenge whether it occurred at all,
(03:51):
but we know that and the following years other cat
owners may have hosted a similar somehow lesser known of
the the event that finally put cat shows on the
map was a national competition at London's Crystal Palace in
eighteen seventy one, and a huge reason for feline popularity
(04:16):
in the UK after that time was a man named
Harrison Weir. He was an artist. He was also the
father of cat fancy. That is his that is his name,
That's how he's known. He is responsible for writing the
first pedigree cat book, which with the lovely title Our
Cats and All About Them. He also founded the UK
(04:39):
National Cat Club. You know the thing with breeding animals
and dog shows and oh there's also a contest for
like the most beautiful goat in some country. I can't
remember which one. Uh. The thing about those all those
shows is they set standards for specific cat breeds. So
like a Persian cat, then it's this quantifiable list of
(05:03):
things that make them the most persian of cats? Or
what's the most the most jellical of cats? Right? Am?
I getting that right? Jelical the jelical cats the most
absurd concept in all of Broadway musical history. What does
it even mean? What? What is a jelical cat? Nobody knows?
I watched the first, not the entirety, but maybe the
(05:25):
first segment of the live action Cats. Have you guys
seen it? Yeah, it's nightmare fuel. My friend, it is
uh not good? A and and dare I say actively uncomfortable?
You know, like I'm a I'm a proponent of personal
liberty in many situations. So even if drugs aren't for me,
(05:46):
I think it's fine for people to experiment. I just
don't think it should affect your work. Yeah, that's true.
What's the guy's name, Toby something? Tom Hooper is his name?
Odd choice with that one. He really went down the
Broadway rabbit hole. The King's speech was a fine little film,
and then like his lame is is quite good actually,
but this was just he really jumped the cat on
(06:07):
this one. And can you imagine if they had left
the butt holes in? I want to see that cut.
That's apparently a cut where the weird anthromorphized over sexualized
cat people have cat butt holes. I heard that. I
heard that from one of my friends who who got
a little bit steamed with me because he saw cats
in the theater. Remember this came out pre pandemic, and
(06:29):
I was roasting him about it, and it's like, you
secretly love this film and he said, no, here are
some facts about it. And he's the one who hitped
me into the uh the infamous butt hole at it,
which is sort of like the Snyder at It of cats. Exactly.
It's very it's it's it's gonna come out eventually. I
saw in the theater Sto by the way, with my
kid and both of the Throughout the whole thing, we
(06:51):
were just looking at each other like uncomfortably, just like
what even as this? But you know, I can't. I
won't walk out of a movie no matter how unbearable
bad it is. But here's the thing, Cats, the musical
uh has always kind of had a bit of a
bad rap. Uh. It's very very very popular, but very
perplexing a lot of people that don't get it. It's
a little odd, it's not you know, it's it seems
(07:13):
like the kind of Broadway show that was very much
the product of the time and cocaine. Um, I'm gonna argue,
but you know it made a lot of money as
a little longest running Broadway shows in history. Cats as
a species also got a bit of a bad rap
throughout history, didn't there, That's right? And you know, staying
on cats, the adaptation for just one moment. My primary
(07:34):
question watching this, I want to open this to the
rest of our fellow ridiculous historians, is uh, what would T.
S Elliott think? Would he dig it? Would he be
like four point five stars? Where where the buttholes? I
don't know. Question lost to history. But you are you
are right about cats. No, they've been a divisive creature
(07:55):
in human culture. Uh. Part of their behavior can be
explained by the act that cats appear to have domesticated themselves,
rather than having being bred into domestication the way wolves
eventually were bred into dogs. Yea further proof that they
do not need us, right right, Well, it's just human beings,
(08:15):
being a relatively filthy species generated a lot of trash,
which generates a lot of vermin, which works out for
cats anyway. We know that cats have gone through ups
and downs in their career. They have been at times
lauded as sacred beings, and they have been also, you know,
the subject of much mistrust. In ancient Egypt, people loved cats.
(08:39):
This is proven conclusively in the archaeological record. In fact,
a fund thing I learned recently the word for cats
in ancient Egyptian was now or like now m au.
Really that's where the automotopeia of a cat sound came from. Huh,
(09:00):
there's some meme out there, you guys got to see it.
Where where you learned the ancient Egyptian word for cat
was now? And it's like you pickture, an ancient Egyptian
saying what the heck are you? A cat goes and
they go all right, yeah, well you see they even
named themselves totally don't need us. We are absolutely an afterthought.
But the the Egyptians did need cats, that's the thing,
(09:23):
much more than the cats needed them, because they were
basically worshiped, right though. There are many of their goddesses
and and and the pantheon of like Egyptian kind of
uh deities had anthropomorphic animal type features. And bass Debt
was an ancient Egyptian goddess of love who had the
(09:44):
head of a cat. So therefore, the killing of a
cat in Egypt was a big no no uh, it
would actually be punishable by death. I'm pretty sure a
lot of things in ancient Egypt were probably punishable by death,
but killing a cat was definitely one of them. Absolutely,
And this, uh, this care for cats was something that
(10:05):
ancient Romans would have recognized. Their love of felines was
a little bit more secular because cats were seen as
a symbol of liberty, and then even more practical the
further east yougo. In the Far East, cats were considered
valuable to society because they hunted rodents that could otherwise
(10:29):
damage manuscripts and documents. Uh. And then for some reason,
cats got a really bad image in Europe during the
Middle Ages. You know what we're talking about black cats,
which is black mass Yeah, the old the old image
of the cats is like which is trusty familiar. Uh.
(10:51):
The idea that they were somehow a liaison, you know,
between the the practitioner of black magic and the devil himself. Um.
So this was a time, this is basically a cat
apocalypse where they were just killed left and right. Um,
in a completely misplaced effort to you know, vanquish evil. Right.
(11:13):
And when I say misplaced, I mean not only ideologically
but also practically, because it caused the rodent infestation to
absolutely swell and lead to you got it, the black flag.
This dislike of cats continues in Europe for some time.
(11:36):
You can read no small amount of dissertations arguing various
various reasons why cats got such a bad rep in
this part of the world. Over at the Boston Globe,
in the article The Crazy History of the Cat Lady,
they point out that some scholars argue cats have been
part of households as pest control since humans settled into
(11:59):
the agricultural era. That's true, but they remained aloof and
because they were not domesticated or assimilated into the social
hierarchy the same way dogs were, this may have upset
the Christian hierarchical ordering of life on Earth at the time,
which was like man at top and then other things.
Uh So, cats who were kind of in this liminal
(12:23):
space between the wild and the domestic, we're always going
to be a little bit suss. Also, we should mention,
speaking of a more brutal time, Noel, when you said
a lot of things may have gotten you the death penalty.
In Egypt, a lot of animals were frequently tortured or
killed for sport. So people who were overly into cats
(12:45):
we're also seen as kind of suss, Like, hey, we
we torture these things for fun. You're you're getting real
weird agnes or tobias or whatever, which is strange because cats,
like you said, throughout history have always served a really
functional role. Uh. Even in the Middle Ages they killed vermin, mice,
(13:06):
rats and the like, things that would have potentially contaminated
people's food supply or water or just you know, they're
kind of gross and he's definitely don't want them crawling
all over your house so bad. Rap aside. Uh, cats
absolutely have always kind of like played an important role
because I mean, dogs, I guess we'll do that kind
(13:26):
of or you can train them to to do it,
but it's not something they just kind of have a
natural inclination doing. Cats will do it whether you whether
you want them to or not. I used to have
it indoor outdoor cat that would just constantly leave weird
speaking of cats being laisons of the devil, would leave
weird vivisected animal parts at my front stoop, like literally
(13:47):
almost like a staged serial killer crime scene from like
seven or something. It was quite quite horrific and terrifying.
It's only indoor cats for me from now on. There's
a really great quote from William cat Exton about this
relationship that cats have with little creatures like that, and
it goes the devil playeth oft with the sanar, like
(14:09):
as the cat doth with the mouse. So there you go. Hmmm,
the idea of being that cats catching mice are employing
tactics similar to how the devil catches human souls. It's
a bit of a leap um. You know later will
(14:29):
find as a species that this behavior, which is very
common in cats, this behavior of of giving mostly dead
or dead animals to their human pals, is somewhere between
trying to teach you to hunt, the implication being that
you suck at hunting, or trying to feed you. So
(14:50):
their attentions are good, but they're wildly misread, and I
can I can understand that like nobody's why are you
bringing me this? Um? By the twelfth century or so,
people really normalize this association with felines and the devil.
Around eleven eight, Walter Mapp published something wherein he examines
(15:13):
his ideas of Satanic rituals, and he says it goes
down like this. They gave it a black catch before
his devotees. Your worship was put out delight and draw
near to the place where they saw their basta. They
feared after him, and when they have found him. They
kissed him under the tail. So sorry, they're like cat
(15:38):
butt kissing. That's what Walter Mapp thought happened during during
these Satanic rituals. And then you would think, Okay, maybe
this is just an artifact of the times, right, maybe
this is just a fad that goes away. But it
didn't change post Middle Ages, didn't all, No, it didn't
at all. In fact, it got worse. Cats be came
(16:00):
even more linked with black magic and UH and witchery
and all of that. Agnes Waterhouse, who was the first
woman in England who was executed for witchcraft um in
fifteen sixty six, confessed to having a cat and keeping
it as a familiar, which I love that term, by
the way, familiar being just an animal kind of uh,
(16:21):
that you keep that a witch keeps around or or
a wizard keeps around. Uh. And you know, usually you
can use them to I almost act as like a
surrogate kind of like they they they'll do your bidding,
you know, in theory or whatever, or they'll like do
things for you, or they'll you know, potentially do things
you know to others on your behalf. Uh. It's interesting
and i'd love to to hear a little bit more
(16:42):
about the history of that term familiar. But reporting on
this at the time, UH said that Waterhouse called the
cat satan and actually said it to kill her husband
in return for feeding it her own blood. Yikes, with
knowing the details of their marriage, maybe it's unfair for
(17:04):
us to UH to assume that was not a deal
on the up and up. You know, maybe it made sense,
Maybe it made sense we had all the factors together,
like maybe he had it coming. Maybe maybe Uh. So
here we are, cats have already had some skyrocketing social
highs and some physically dangerous social lows. If you fast
(17:27):
forward to the eighteen sixties, the average cat is considered
like lower working class now because they catch rats and
you shouldn't have rats in a nice house. So there's
street animals. They're considered useful because they hunt vermin, but
they're not really considered like cute, cudly companion animals. Even
(17:50):
Charles Darwin complains about them in On the Origin of
the Species, and Windsor Magazine says that they're just a
necessary household appendage. So if you think about it back
at that time, snuggling with a cat would be like
having a really deep emotional relationship with your blender. It did,
(18:11):
it didn't make sense to people. They might not burn
you at the steak anymore, but they would be like, wow,
blender lady is weird. Absolutely um. And even moreover, the
fact that they were seen as unclean because of their
relationship with vermin and the fact that they always were
killing them, one would assume that they, you know, are
covered in that same kind of filth um, which, to
(18:35):
be fair, if you have an outdoor cat, you're probably
snuggling with the cat that has you know, vivisected creatures
out in the wild. So worked to the wise there.
But anyway, it's interesting. As time goes on, cats become polarizing,
interestingly enough, like I mean, they kind of always already
have been a little bit, but this is really like
(18:55):
takes to the next level. There's an absolute split on
people's opinions about hats in the nineteenth century. Yes, so
at the beginning of what we call the Victorian era today,
cats and animals in general were becoming more and more popular.
If you went to a classy Victorian home, you would
see plants, you would see animals, and if people were
(19:18):
really bawling out you would see some fish. Uh. This
is also, by the way, the age where the garden
hermit fad took off. You guys remember that from our
earlier episode where you just paid somebody to be weird
at your backyard just to hang out in your garden.
Very strange. That was on our Weird Flex episode. I
believe you, Yes, yes, I believe that's correct. That by
(19:40):
the way, quick sidebar, there's a there's this guy in
Japan who figured out this amazing thing. Uh. He was
my hero of the week a few weeks ago. There's
a guy he's working right now. I know this because
we're Twitter friends. He's working right now where you can
rent him to do nothing. He will hang out with you.
(20:03):
He will respond too simple, non philosophical questions, and he
will just sort of go do stuff that you. He
will go stand around while you do stuff. Uh, what
is what's what's that guy's name? Looks like it's show
Gi Morimoto. That's right, Casey on the case. So he's
like a professional like guy on the couch, he's a
(20:25):
professional mooch essentially. Yeah, he's a professional just hang out
with you, companion person. I guess he's kind of a
professional cat any anyhow, shout out, shout out to you, sir. Uh,
there's a great Vice article about him, if you'd like
to learn more. Uh. So, there's this interesting thing. So
(20:46):
some scholars, like author Kathleen Keat, who wrote The Beast
in the Boudoir pet Keeping a nineteenth century Paris, argue
that there's a compensation thing going on here in the
upper class. They're saying, at the people who are really classy,
the pet owners were in fact compensating for their inability
to control the lower working classes of humans. So they
(21:10):
would put that desire for domination into keeping pets and plants.
That is brilliant, What a power move. Yeah, it's like, okay,
you can't you know, you can't exercise any autonomy over
your own life. So here have have this like small
creature to take care of and and exert dominance over. Uh.
(21:32):
That's fantastic. Um I can relate. Honestly, I think that
sentiment still holds true a little bit today. UM. So
here's the thing as as this kind of Oh I
don't know, I guess you could call it renaissance of
of of cats, pets in general, but cats in particular. Uh,
came around. There was a kind of a new movement
(21:54):
established um to give them, to treat them more like
members of the family instead of just like furniture or
you know, functional kind of doers like rap exactly, rap
room us. Uh. This this idea of kind of imbuing
them with feelings and emotions and that they were like
one of us. This became a thing. In eighteen fifty
(22:17):
the Graham in law in France UH officially prohibited the
abuse of animals there, which is a big deal. It
seems like Doug like, that's something that we take for granted,
the idea of animal cruelty. But to your point Ban earlier,
in the Middle Ages and beyond, animals cats in particular
were very universally tortured. Yeah. Absolutely, it was an accepted
(22:40):
fact of life. So we're going to dive into this,
where do we get this weird social thing about uh
cat ladies quote unquote. The bond between women and cats
seems to be called even more pronounced during the nineteenth century,
(23:01):
at least in terms of uh social acknowledgement of it.
So a lot of people had said that they had
said that there was something specifically between female members of
the human species as they identified at the time and
cats in a History of French Passions, Anxiety and Hypocrisy,
(23:26):
Volume five. By the way, France, Sorry, CAZy, this is crazy.
There are five volumes of this. Have you ever heard
of this book? I have not. I'm in I'm intrigued,
but I have to say I'm probably not likely to
read it. Okay, come, I'll give you. I don't know
if I'm gonna read volume one and four. It may
prejudice us against the country. But it's okay. We can
(23:48):
just exert. We can just we can just exert. So uh.
Theodore Zelden, the author of this book, notes that many
contemporaneous observers said women are lavishing affects in on all
kinds of animals, especially cats, because it's a refuge from
the brutality and all the all the terrible behavior they
(24:09):
have to accept from men. That's and that's crazily enough.
That's the positive spin. There's a negative spin here as well.
Oh boy, is there ever? And I just want to
say that this, this, this, the thing you just described
is very much in keeping with that previous kind of
notion of of like lower class for example, or you know,
folks that don't have very much control over their lives
(24:31):
being able to kind of like get that out or
at least that frustration out by taking care of pets
and feeling like superior. This takes it into a much
more gendered and kind of offensive direction. Even the even
the nice version that you just mentioned is a little
bit sexist, the idea that women are lavishing all this
attention on these animals because they're you know, less than
(24:54):
or But then, you know, if you want to look
at it in terms of the reality, I mean, it
was a brutal time for women where men absolutely dominated
all aspects of society and treated women like chattel essentially. Um.
And of course leave it to men to to take
this and turn it an even more of a horrible
misogynist direction in saying that women and cats shared the
(25:16):
same horrish disposition. Uh in some way they had qualities
that were compared to sex workers or prostitutes what they
would have called um just another way of of kind
of like you know, keeping keeping women down, uh and
using this thing that might have been a nice respite
(25:38):
from you know, the horrors of male dominated society, uh,
and turning it around as another way of kind of
mothering women and saying, yeah, of course you're hanging out
with cats. So there's there's a quote here one of
worn people, this aged like milk. Uh. In eighteen fifty
five author i'll Fonse Tilsonell said, an animal so keen
(26:04):
on maintaining her appearance, so silky, so tiny, so eager
for caresses, so ardent and responsive, so graceful and supple.
An animal that makes the night her day, and who
shocks decent people with the noise of her orgies can
only have one single analogy in the world, and that
analogy is of the feminine kind. And he goes on
(26:25):
and on and on. Uh. And then at the very
end he says, of whom are we writing of the
cat or the other? Meaning women? This guy must have
been a lot of fun at parties and first dates. Yeah, no,
no doubt about it. Uh. He went on to to
double down and added lazy and frivolous and spending entire
(26:47):
days and contemplation and sleep while pretending to be hunting
mice referring to cats. I'm assuming not women in capable
of the least effort when it comes to anything repugnant,
but into fact aligable when it is a matter of pleasure,
of play, of sex, love of the night. Guess, guys,
a real piece of work. The other here is women yep, yep.
(27:13):
And then he goes on to talk about either the
cat or the human females, ingratitude and aridity of hearts.
I think I think Alphonse had some stuff to work out.
I think at the end he didn't know which he
was accusing of what. But anyhow, this leads us into
(27:34):
the idea of the crazy cat lady. So it may
have started, of course with the concept of witches and
familiars in the fifteen hundreds in Europe at least, but
by the late seventeen hundreds we see the emergence of
what will become the modern cat lady stereotype. Around this time,
(27:56):
as many as one out of five women would not
end up being married, and again a very misogynistic time
when women were evaluated as worthy or unworthy based on
their whether or not they were married. So this was
a huge problem in England at the time. The Protestant
(28:16):
Reformation of the fifteen forties had made convents no longer
really a thing. So if you are uh the the
head of a household. You can't just send your unmarried
daughters off to the convent anymore. And there's a rock
and a hard place situation, because also it's unseemly if
(28:39):
you're a woman for you to work. So unmarried women
became like the way cats were characterized earlier. They became
treated like appendages of their relatives households, and they were
called that's where they you know, they were called spinsters
and things like that. Uh, And they often led lives
even if they were financially well to do and didn't
(29:00):
have to worry about food or having shelter. Uh, they
were often living these pretty isolated, unhappy lives, you know. Yeah, yeah,
I mean it's it really is kind of a self
fulfilling prophecy, right. I mean, they're absolutely treated like second
class citizens. They're not given the opportunities to take care
(29:20):
of themselves, and then they ultimately become this kind of like,
uh source for ridicule, like as as as if they
have done something wrong or as if this is like
a choice that they've made. It's it's really pretty disgusting.
So you had this kind of type emerge and and
the most iconic version historically of the cat lady is
(29:42):
someone by the name of Gertrude Savill's who lived in
the time of King George in England. Um. And it
was kind of seen as the archetype of of the
of the cat lady, and was parodied in cartoons and
was kind of seen as the prototypical cat lady. Moving
into the Victorian era, the stereotypes of the old maid
and like, you know, bevy of like feline counterparts became
(30:06):
such a kind of running gag that in an eighteen
eighty issue of The Dundee Courier. Uh, they declared that quote,
the old maid would not be typical of her class
without the cat, but one cannot exist without the other,
so that they were inextricably linked. Um. And you know,
cats were at this time even viewed like we view
(30:30):
them today, largely as being pretty pretty clever, very self involved,
again the idea of not really needing humans. But on
the other hand, the spinsters or the old maize were
seen as being somehow like kind of insane or eccentric, uh,
you know, having burned all their bridges and squandered all
(30:52):
their opportunities. Um. The term blighted hopes was used in
that Dundee Courier article, and here's here's a full quote.
Old maids and cats have long been proverbially associated together,
and rightly or wrongly, these creatures have been looked upon
with a certain degree of suspicion and aversion by a
large proportion of the human race. There's nothing at all
(31:12):
surprising in the old maid choosing a cat as a
household pet or companion. Solitude is not congenial to human nature,
and a poor forlorn female shut up in a cheerless garret,
brooding all alone over her blighted hopes there it is,
would naturally center her affections on some of the lower animals,
and none could be more congenial as a pet and
(31:33):
companion than a kindly purring pussy. I conjecture that etymologically speaking, uh,
this would be part of the reason, around the same
time that we uh, that we see the emergence of
that slang word for Jeditalia because of that association. Now
I was thinking the same thing, Okay, okay, I think
(31:54):
this is the perfect place to take a pause. Uh.
And and we'll resume this two parter on Thursday. In
the meantime, huge thanks to super producer Casey Pegram, Alex
Williams who composed our theme, Gabe Bluesier researcher Extraordinarire, big
big thanks to Christopher Hasciota's big big thanks to Eve's
Jeff co we need to have back on the show again. Uh,
(32:15):
and of course, as always big thanks to our own
indoor outdoor cat, Jonathan Strickland, a k a. The Quizter. Uh.
Go ahead, feel free to send some of your pet
pictures our way. You can find us on the internet.
Go to Facebook dot com type in Ridiculous Historians. That
(32:37):
is our shows community page. All you have to do
is answer a question uh, something very easy like identifying
super producer Casey Pegram, my pal, Noel or myself or
just you know, make us laugh, have a pun uh,
and then you can You can find the show on
Instagram and Twitter as well. It's probably gonna be more
enjoyable to follow us as individuals. That's correct. You can
(32:59):
find me on Instagram where I am at how Now,
Noel Brown, how about you sarn folks, cat fanciers and
cat haters alike. You can find me and message me
or pet pictures directly. I am at Ben Bulling on Instagram.
I'm at Ben Bulling hs W on Twitter. I sweird
that the Egyptian word for cat is now. Yeah, it's weird,
(33:21):
but also it makes too much sense. Uh. And hey,
while you're on the internet, when I leave a review
on Apple podcast or your podcast platform of choice, but
preferably Apple Podcast, it helps people discover the show and
helps us, uh, you know, feel good about ourselves when
we say nice things. We'll see you next time, folks.
(33:46):
For more podcasts for my heart Radio, visit the I
Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to
your favorite shows.
Ridiculous History is a production of I Heart Radio. Welcome
(00:27):
to the show Ridiculous Historians. As always, thank you so
much for tuning in. Today's episode is especially dedicated to
I Luri files a word I just learned that means
lover of cats. Ben, I thought you were about to
say a word I just made up, but it sounds
(00:47):
too fancy and science e for that to be the case.
I don't know this word either, Ben, Yeah, yeah, it's
uh a I l u r O file. Also a
cat fancier we've got. We've got a bunch of fans
of cats, dogs, pats, animals in general in the crowd
today and notes here uh that my pal Nolan I
(01:10):
are ourselves cat owners. So this will necessarily be a
two part episode. You know, there's always been this kind
of I would say, a false divide between dog lovers
and cat lovers. There are some people who feel like
those things are mutually exclusive, but nol I um. I
see it in some people, but usually I disagree. I think.
(01:33):
I think, especially the rise of the cat memes and
videos online, have have done a lot for the reputations
of our feline friends. What would you say I would
agree with that, and Ben, I was reminded just the
other day of a little brief period in cat internet
meme video culture where people were spooking their cats with cucumbers.
We can, guys remember this. That seemed to be a
(01:55):
very universal reaction. Cats would not not only gets spooked,
they would just jump straight up in the air. I'm
assuming that they thought it was a snake or something
like that. But uh yeah, I don't know why that
popped out from my my mental index the other day,
but I went and looked at like a nice super
cut of all of them, and then sure enough, every
single cat jumps straight up in the air. But it's true, Ben, cats,
the internet has really made cats kind of a universal thing,
(02:20):
whether it's like your grumpy cat, you're a little bub
remember a little Bub when we were in by Discovery
Channel because he was technically our our coworker. Yes. And
while you're on the Internet, by the way, you can
also go to t Public and check out our ridiculous
history swag featuring a T shirt with none other than
super producer Casey Pegram Casey I, I don't want people
(02:44):
to equate you with little Bub. We we make high
quality memes here at ridiculous history. Only the best memes here,
only the best. Yeah. For the longest time I thought
it was little bubbs, but is not plural. Who's just
a single bub um? But you know, the thing about
cats too is the expression in cats comes to mind
as possibly a good argument for why maybe cat shows
(03:05):
aren't as much of a thing as dog shows. Dogs
can be trained, they prance around on command. They're much
more beholden to their masters. Cats are kind of notoriously
fickle and kind of do whatever they want. And I'm
assuming there still are cat shows, but you don't really
hear about them in the same way as you would, like, say,
the Westminster dog show. But it turns out that there is.
We can pinpoint the world's very first cat show. Uh.
(03:29):
And it wasn't held in Westminster, mind you, but it
was held at the St Giles Fair in Winchester, also
in England. In it's true, uh, we we don't know
much about this first cat show other than that date.
In fact, some historians challenge whether it occurred at all,
(03:51):
but we know that and the following years other cat
owners may have hosted a similar somehow lesser known of
the the event that finally put cat shows on the
map was a national competition at London's Crystal Palace in
eighteen seventy one, and a huge reason for feline popularity
(04:16):
in the UK after that time was a man named
Harrison Weir. He was an artist. He was also the
father of cat fancy. That is his that is his name,
That's how he's known. He is responsible for writing the
first pedigree cat book, which with the lovely title Our
Cats and All About Them. He also founded the UK
(04:39):
National Cat Club. You know the thing with breeding animals
and dog shows and oh there's also a contest for
like the most beautiful goat in some country. I can't
remember which one. Uh. The thing about those all those
shows is they set standards for specific cat breeds. So
like a Persian cat, then it's this quantifiable list of
(05:03):
things that make them the most persian of cats? Or
what's the most the most jellical of cats? Right? Am?
I getting that right? Jelical the jelical cats the most
absurd concept in all of Broadway musical history. What does
it even mean? What? What is a jelical cat? Nobody knows?
I watched the first, not the entirety, but maybe the
(05:25):
first segment of the live action Cats. Have you guys
seen it? Yeah, it's nightmare fuel. My friend, it is
uh not good? A and and dare I say actively uncomfortable?
You know, like I'm a I'm a proponent of personal
liberty in many situations. So even if drugs aren't for me,
(05:46):
I think it's fine for people to experiment. I just
don't think it should affect your work. Yeah, that's true.
What's the guy's name, Toby something? Tom Hooper is his name?
Odd choice with that one. He really went down the
Broadway rabbit hole. The King's speech was a fine little film,
and then like his lame is is quite good actually,
but this was just he really jumped the cat on
(06:07):
this one. And can you imagine if they had left
the butt holes in? I want to see that cut.
That's apparently a cut where the weird anthromorphized over sexualized
cat people have cat butt holes. I heard that. I
heard that from one of my friends who who got
a little bit steamed with me because he saw cats
in the theater. Remember this came out pre pandemic, and
(06:29):
I was roasting him about it, and it's like, you
secretly love this film and he said, no, here are
some facts about it. And he's the one who hitped
me into the uh the infamous butt hole at it,
which is sort of like the Snyder at It of cats. Exactly.
It's very it's it's it's gonna come out eventually. I
saw in the theater Sto by the way, with my
kid and both of the Throughout the whole thing, we
(06:51):
were just looking at each other like uncomfortably, just like
what even as this? But you know, I can't. I
won't walk out of a movie no matter how unbearable
bad it is. But here's the thing, Cats, the musical
uh has always kind of had a bit of a
bad rap. Uh. It's very very very popular, but very
perplexing a lot of people that don't get it. It's
a little odd, it's not you know, it's it seems
(07:13):
like the kind of Broadway show that was very much
the product of the time and cocaine. Um, I'm gonna argue,
but you know it made a lot of money as
a little longest running Broadway shows in history. Cats as
a species also got a bit of a bad rap
throughout history, didn't there, That's right? And you know, staying
on cats, the adaptation for just one moment. My primary
(07:34):
question watching this, I want to open this to the
rest of our fellow ridiculous historians, is uh, what would T.
S Elliott think? Would he dig it? Would he be
like four point five stars? Where where the buttholes? I
don't know. Question lost to history. But you are you
are right about cats. No, they've been a divisive creature
(07:55):
in human culture. Uh. Part of their behavior can be
explained by the act that cats appear to have domesticated themselves,
rather than having being bred into domestication the way wolves
eventually were bred into dogs. Yea further proof that they
do not need us, right right, Well, it's just human beings,
(08:15):
being a relatively filthy species generated a lot of trash,
which generates a lot of vermin, which works out for
cats anyway. We know that cats have gone through ups
and downs in their career. They have been at times
lauded as sacred beings, and they have been also, you know,
the subject of much mistrust. In ancient Egypt, people loved cats.
(08:39):
This is proven conclusively in the archaeological record. In fact,
a fund thing I learned recently the word for cats
in ancient Egyptian was now or like now m au.
Really that's where the automotopeia of a cat sound came from. Huh,
(09:00):
there's some meme out there, you guys got to see it.
Where where you learned the ancient Egyptian word for cat
was now? And it's like you pickture, an ancient Egyptian
saying what the heck are you? A cat goes and
they go all right, yeah, well you see they even
named themselves totally don't need us. We are absolutely an afterthought.
But the the Egyptians did need cats, that's the thing,
(09:23):
much more than the cats needed them, because they were
basically worshiped, right though. There are many of their goddesses
and and and the pantheon of like Egyptian kind of
uh deities had anthropomorphic animal type features. And bass Debt
was an ancient Egyptian goddess of love who had the
(09:44):
head of a cat. So therefore, the killing of a
cat in Egypt was a big no no uh, it
would actually be punishable by death. I'm pretty sure a
lot of things in ancient Egypt were probably punishable by death,
but killing a cat was definitely one of them. Absolutely,
And this, uh, this care for cats was something that
(10:05):
ancient Romans would have recognized. Their love of felines was
a little bit more secular because cats were seen as
a symbol of liberty, and then even more practical the
further east yougo. In the Far East, cats were considered
valuable to society because they hunted rodents that could otherwise
(10:29):
damage manuscripts and documents. Uh. And then for some reason,
cats got a really bad image in Europe during the
Middle Ages. You know what we're talking about black cats,
which is black mass Yeah, the old the old image
of the cats is like which is trusty familiar. Uh.
(10:51):
The idea that they were somehow a liaison, you know,
between the the practitioner of black magic and the devil himself. Um.
So this was a time, this is basically a cat
apocalypse where they were just killed left and right. Um,
in a completely misplaced effort to you know, vanquish evil. Right.
(11:13):
And when I say misplaced, I mean not only ideologically
but also practically, because it caused the rodent infestation to
absolutely swell and lead to you got it, the black flag.
This dislike of cats continues in Europe for some time.
(11:36):
You can read no small amount of dissertations arguing various
various reasons why cats got such a bad rep in
this part of the world. Over at the Boston Globe,
in the article The Crazy History of the Cat Lady,
they point out that some scholars argue cats have been
part of households as pest control since humans settled into
(11:59):
the agricultural era. That's true, but they remained aloof and
because they were not domesticated or assimilated into the social
hierarchy the same way dogs were, this may have upset
the Christian hierarchical ordering of life on Earth at the time,
which was like man at top and then other things.
Uh So, cats who were kind of in this liminal
(12:23):
space between the wild and the domestic, we're always going
to be a little bit suss. Also, we should mention,
speaking of a more brutal time, Noel, when you said
a lot of things may have gotten you the death penalty.
In Egypt, a lot of animals were frequently tortured or
killed for sport. So people who were overly into cats
(12:45):
we're also seen as kind of suss, Like, hey, we
we torture these things for fun. You're you're getting real
weird agnes or tobias or whatever, which is strange because cats,
like you said, throughout history have always served a really
functional role. Uh. Even in the Middle Ages they killed vermin, mice,
(13:06):
rats and the like, things that would have potentially contaminated
people's food supply or water or just you know, they're
kind of gross and he's definitely don't want them crawling
all over your house so bad. Rap aside. Uh, cats
absolutely have always kind of like played an important role
because I mean, dogs, I guess we'll do that kind
(13:26):
of or you can train them to to do it,
but it's not something they just kind of have a
natural inclination doing. Cats will do it whether you whether
you want them to or not. I used to have
it indoor outdoor cat that would just constantly leave weird
speaking of cats being laisons of the devil, would leave
weird vivisected animal parts at my front stoop, like literally
(13:47):
almost like a staged serial killer crime scene from like
seven or something. It was quite quite horrific and terrifying.
It's only indoor cats for me from now on. There's
a really great quote from William cat Exton about this
relationship that cats have with little creatures like that, and
it goes the devil playeth oft with the sanar, like
(14:09):
as the cat doth with the mouse. So there you go. Hmmm,
the idea of being that cats catching mice are employing
tactics similar to how the devil catches human souls. It's
a bit of a leap um. You know later will
(14:29):
find as a species that this behavior, which is very
common in cats, this behavior of of giving mostly dead
or dead animals to their human pals, is somewhere between
trying to teach you to hunt, the implication being that
you suck at hunting, or trying to feed you. So
(14:50):
their attentions are good, but they're wildly misread, and I
can I can understand that like nobody's why are you
bringing me this? Um? By the twelfth century or so,
people really normalize this association with felines and the devil.
Around eleven eight, Walter Mapp published something wherein he examines
(15:13):
his ideas of Satanic rituals, and he says it goes
down like this. They gave it a black catch before
his devotees. Your worship was put out delight and draw
near to the place where they saw their basta. They
feared after him, and when they have found him. They
kissed him under the tail. So sorry, they're like cat
(15:38):
butt kissing. That's what Walter Mapp thought happened during during
these Satanic rituals. And then you would think, Okay, maybe
this is just an artifact of the times, right, maybe
this is just a fad that goes away. But it
didn't change post Middle Ages, didn't all, No, it didn't
at all. In fact, it got worse. Cats be came
(16:00):
even more linked with black magic and UH and witchery
and all of that. Agnes Waterhouse, who was the first
woman in England who was executed for witchcraft um in
fifteen sixty six, confessed to having a cat and keeping
it as a familiar, which I love that term, by
the way, familiar being just an animal kind of uh,
(16:21):
that you keep that a witch keeps around or or
a wizard keeps around. Uh. And you know, usually you
can use them to I almost act as like a
surrogate kind of like they they they'll do your bidding,
you know, in theory or whatever, or they'll like do
things for you, or they'll you know, potentially do things
you know to others on your behalf. Uh. It's interesting
and i'd love to to hear a little bit more
(16:42):
about the history of that term familiar. But reporting on
this at the time, UH said that Waterhouse called the
cat satan and actually said it to kill her husband
in return for feeding it her own blood. Yikes, with
knowing the details of their marriage, maybe it's unfair for
(17:04):
us to UH to assume that was not a deal
on the up and up. You know, maybe it made sense,
Maybe it made sense we had all the factors together,
like maybe he had it coming. Maybe maybe Uh. So
here we are, cats have already had some skyrocketing social
highs and some physically dangerous social lows. If you fast
(17:27):
forward to the eighteen sixties, the average cat is considered
like lower working class now because they catch rats and
you shouldn't have rats in a nice house. So there's
street animals. They're considered useful because they hunt vermin, but
they're not really considered like cute, cudly companion animals. Even
(17:50):
Charles Darwin complains about them in On the Origin of
the Species, and Windsor Magazine says that they're just a
necessary household appendage. So if you think about it back
at that time, snuggling with a cat would be like
having a really deep emotional relationship with your blender. It did,
(18:11):
it didn't make sense to people. They might not burn
you at the steak anymore, but they would be like, wow,
blender lady is weird. Absolutely um. And even moreover, the
fact that they were seen as unclean because of their
relationship with vermin and the fact that they always were
killing them, one would assume that they, you know, are
covered in that same kind of filth um, which, to
(18:35):
be fair, if you have an outdoor cat, you're probably
snuggling with the cat that has you know, vivisected creatures
out in the wild. So worked to the wise there.
But anyway, it's interesting. As time goes on, cats become polarizing,
interestingly enough, like I mean, they kind of always already
have been a little bit, but this is really like
(18:55):
takes to the next level. There's an absolute split on
people's opinions about hats in the nineteenth century. Yes, so
at the beginning of what we call the Victorian era today,
cats and animals in general were becoming more and more popular.
If you went to a classy Victorian home, you would
see plants, you would see animals, and if people were
(19:18):
really bawling out you would see some fish. Uh. This
is also, by the way, the age where the garden
hermit fad took off. You guys remember that from our
earlier episode where you just paid somebody to be weird
at your backyard just to hang out in your garden.
Very strange. That was on our Weird Flex episode. I
believe you, Yes, yes, I believe that's correct. That by
(19:40):
the way, quick sidebar, there's a there's this guy in
Japan who figured out this amazing thing. Uh. He was
my hero of the week a few weeks ago. There's
a guy he's working right now. I know this because
we're Twitter friends. He's working right now where you can
rent him to do nothing. He will hang out with you.
(20:03):
He will respond too simple, non philosophical questions, and he
will just sort of go do stuff that you. He
will go stand around while you do stuff. Uh, what
is what's what's that guy's name? Looks like it's show
Gi Morimoto. That's right, Casey on the case. So he's
like a professional like guy on the couch, he's a
(20:25):
professional mooch essentially. Yeah, he's a professional just hang out
with you, companion person. I guess he's kind of a
professional cat any anyhow, shout out, shout out to you, sir. Uh,
there's a great Vice article about him, if you'd like
to learn more. Uh. So, there's this interesting thing. So
(20:46):
some scholars, like author Kathleen Keat, who wrote The Beast
in the Boudoir pet Keeping a nineteenth century Paris, argue
that there's a compensation thing going on here in the
upper class. They're saying, at the people who are really classy,
the pet owners were in fact compensating for their inability
to control the lower working classes of humans. So they
(21:10):
would put that desire for domination into keeping pets and plants.
That is brilliant, What a power move. Yeah, it's like, okay,
you can't you know, you can't exercise any autonomy over
your own life. So here have have this like small
creature to take care of and and exert dominance over. Uh.
(21:32):
That's fantastic. Um I can relate. Honestly, I think that
sentiment still holds true a little bit today. UM. So
here's the thing as as this kind of Oh I
don't know, I guess you could call it renaissance of
of of cats, pets in general, but cats in particular. Uh,
came around. There was a kind of a new movement
(21:54):
established um to give them, to treat them more like
members of the family instead of just like furniture or
you know, functional kind of doers like rap exactly, rap
room us. Uh. This this idea of kind of imbuing
them with feelings and emotions and that they were like
one of us. This became a thing. In eighteen fifty
(22:17):
the Graham in law in France UH officially prohibited the
abuse of animals there, which is a big deal. It
seems like Doug like, that's something that we take for granted,
the idea of animal cruelty. But to your point Ban earlier,
in the Middle Ages and beyond, animals cats in particular
were very universally tortured. Yeah. Absolutely, it was an accepted
(22:40):
fact of life. So we're going to dive into this,
where do we get this weird social thing about uh
cat ladies quote unquote. The bond between women and cats
seems to be called even more pronounced during the nineteenth century,
(23:01):
at least in terms of uh social acknowledgement of it.
So a lot of people had said that they had
said that there was something specifically between female members of
the human species as they identified at the time and
cats in a History of French Passions, Anxiety and Hypocrisy,
(23:26):
Volume five. By the way, France, Sorry, CAZy, this is crazy.
There are five volumes of this. Have you ever heard
of this book? I have not. I'm in I'm intrigued,
but I have to say I'm probably not likely to
read it. Okay, come, I'll give you. I don't know
if I'm gonna read volume one and four. It may
prejudice us against the country. But it's okay. We can
(23:48):
just exert. We can just we can just exert. So uh.
Theodore Zelden, the author of this book, notes that many
contemporaneous observers said women are lavishing affects in on all
kinds of animals, especially cats, because it's a refuge from
the brutality and all the all the terrible behavior they
(24:09):
have to accept from men. That's and that's crazily enough.
That's the positive spin. There's a negative spin here as well.
Oh boy, is there ever? And I just want to
say that this, this, this, the thing you just described
is very much in keeping with that previous kind of
notion of of like lower class for example, or you know,
folks that don't have very much control over their lives
(24:31):
being able to kind of like get that out or
at least that frustration out by taking care of pets
and feeling like superior. This takes it into a much
more gendered and kind of offensive direction. Even the even
the nice version that you just mentioned is a little
bit sexist, the idea that women are lavishing all this
attention on these animals because they're you know, less than
(24:54):
or But then, you know, if you want to look
at it in terms of the reality, I mean, it
was a brutal time for women where men absolutely dominated
all aspects of society and treated women like chattel essentially. Um.
And of course leave it to men to to take
this and turn it an even more of a horrible
misogynist direction in saying that women and cats shared the
(25:16):
same horrish disposition. Uh in some way they had qualities
that were compared to sex workers or prostitutes what they
would have called um just another way of of kind
of like you know, keeping keeping women down, uh and
using this thing that might have been a nice respite
(25:38):
from you know, the horrors of male dominated society, uh,
and turning it around as another way of kind of
mothering women and saying, yeah, of course you're hanging out
with cats. So there's there's a quote here one of
worn people, this aged like milk. Uh. In eighteen fifty
five author i'll Fonse Tilsonell said, an animal so keen
(26:04):
on maintaining her appearance, so silky, so tiny, so eager
for caresses, so ardent and responsive, so graceful and supple.
An animal that makes the night her day, and who
shocks decent people with the noise of her orgies can
only have one single analogy in the world, and that
analogy is of the feminine kind. And he goes on
(26:25):
and on and on. Uh. And then at the very
end he says, of whom are we writing of the
cat or the other? Meaning women? This guy must have
been a lot of fun at parties and first dates. Yeah, no,
no doubt about it. Uh. He went on to to
double down and added lazy and frivolous and spending entire
(26:47):
days and contemplation and sleep while pretending to be hunting
mice referring to cats. I'm assuming not women in capable
of the least effort when it comes to anything repugnant,
but into fact aligable when it is a matter of pleasure,
of play, of sex, love of the night. Guess, guys,
a real piece of work. The other here is women yep, yep.
(27:13):
And then he goes on to talk about either the
cat or the human females, ingratitude and aridity of hearts.
I think I think Alphonse had some stuff to work out.
I think at the end he didn't know which he
was accusing of what. But anyhow, this leads us into
(27:34):
the idea of the crazy cat lady. So it may
have started, of course with the concept of witches and
familiars in the fifteen hundreds in Europe at least, but
by the late seventeen hundreds we see the emergence of
what will become the modern cat lady stereotype. Around this time,
(27:56):
as many as one out of five women would not
end up being married, and again a very misogynistic time
when women were evaluated as worthy or unworthy based on
their whether or not they were married. So this was
a huge problem in England at the time. The Protestant
(28:16):
Reformation of the fifteen forties had made convents no longer
really a thing. So if you are uh the the
head of a household. You can't just send your unmarried
daughters off to the convent anymore. And there's a rock
and a hard place situation, because also it's unseemly if
(28:39):
you're a woman for you to work. So unmarried women
became like the way cats were characterized earlier. They became
treated like appendages of their relatives households, and they were
called that's where they you know, they were called spinsters
and things like that. Uh, And they often led lives
even if they were financially well to do and didn't
(29:00):
have to worry about food or having shelter. Uh, they
were often living these pretty isolated, unhappy lives, you know. Yeah, yeah,
I mean it's it really is kind of a self
fulfilling prophecy, right. I mean, they're absolutely treated like second
class citizens. They're not given the opportunities to take care
(29:20):
of themselves, and then they ultimately become this kind of like,
uh source for ridicule, like as as as if they
have done something wrong or as if this is like
a choice that they've made. It's it's really pretty disgusting.
So you had this kind of type emerge and and
the most iconic version historically of the cat lady is
(29:42):
someone by the name of Gertrude Savill's who lived in
the time of King George in England. Um. And it
was kind of seen as the archetype of of the
of the cat lady, and was parodied in cartoons and
was kind of seen as the prototypical cat lady. Moving
into the Victorian era, the stereotypes of the old maid
and like, you know, bevy of like feline counterparts became
(30:06):
such a kind of running gag that in an eighteen
eighty issue of The Dundee Courier. Uh, they declared that quote,
the old maid would not be typical of her class
without the cat, but one cannot exist without the other,
so that they were inextricably linked. Um. And you know,
cats were at this time even viewed like we view
(30:30):
them today, largely as being pretty pretty clever, very self involved,
again the idea of not really needing humans. But on
the other hand, the spinsters or the old maize were
seen as being somehow like kind of insane or eccentric, uh,
you know, having burned all their bridges and squandered all
(30:52):
their opportunities. Um. The term blighted hopes was used in
that Dundee Courier article, and here's here's a full quote.
Old maids and cats have long been proverbially associated together,
and rightly or wrongly, these creatures have been looked upon
with a certain degree of suspicion and aversion by a
large proportion of the human race. There's nothing at all
(31:12):
surprising in the old maid choosing a cat as a
household pet or companion. Solitude is not congenial to human nature,
and a poor forlorn female shut up in a cheerless garret,
brooding all alone over her blighted hopes there it is,
would naturally center her affections on some of the lower animals,
and none could be more congenial as a pet and
(31:33):
companion than a kindly purring pussy. I conjecture that etymologically speaking, uh,
this would be part of the reason, around the same
time that we uh, that we see the emergence of
that slang word for Jeditalia because of that association. Now
I was thinking the same thing, Okay, okay, I think
(31:54):
this is the perfect place to take a pause. Uh.
And and we'll resume this two parter on Thursday. In
the meantime, huge thanks to super producer Casey Pegram, Alex
Williams who composed our theme, Gabe Bluesier researcher Extraordinarire, big
big thanks to Christopher Hasciota's big big thanks to Eve's
Jeff co we need to have back on the show again. Uh,
(32:15):
and of course, as always big thanks to our own
indoor outdoor cat, Jonathan Strickland, a k a. The Quizter. Uh.
Go ahead, feel free to send some of your pet
pictures our way. You can find us on the internet.
Go to Facebook dot com type in Ridiculous Historians. That
(32:37):
is our shows community page. All you have to do
is answer a question uh, something very easy like identifying
super producer Casey Pegram, my pal, Noel or myself or
just you know, make us laugh, have a pun uh,
and then you can You can find the show on
Instagram and Twitter as well. It's probably gonna be more
enjoyable to follow us as individuals. That's correct. You can
(32:59):
find me on Instagram where I am at how Now,
Noel Brown, how about you sarn folks, cat fanciers and
cat haters alike. You can find me and message me
or pet pictures directly. I am at Ben Bulling on Instagram.
I'm at Ben Bulling hs W on Twitter. I sweird
that the Egyptian word for cat is now. Yeah, it's weird,
(33:21):
but also it makes too much sense. Uh. And hey,
while you're on the internet, when I leave a review
on Apple podcast or your podcast platform of choice, but
preferably Apple Podcast, it helps people discover the show and
helps us, uh, you know, feel good about ourselves when
we say nice things. We'll see you next time, folks.
(33:46):
For more podcasts for my heart Radio, visit the I
Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to
your favorite shows.
Ridiculous History News
Hosts And Creators
Ben Bowlin
Noel Brown
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