*GASP* Sacrificial cats?!

Heads up friends! I’m going to be at DragonCon in Atlanta, August 29-September 1! My panel schedule is at bottom, and we are going to have SO much fun. If you’re going, I’d love to nerd out with you! I’ll also gladly sign any book you want to shove at me. 🙂 

Did you hear the news? Everything you thought about the relationship between cats and humans is wrong.

Maybe.

Many scientists have assumed that cats started hanging around humans during the Neolithic, around 8,000 years ago. Humans were living relatively fixed lives in dwellings, and those dwellings and the food storage in them attracted pests. Pests attracted cats, and over time, cats and people grew close together.

But what if, as suggested by a pair of preprints* in April, the domestication of cats only goes back to ancient Egypt? And what if it’s because those cats were being bred for ritual sacrifice?

Suddenly, domestication takes on a bit of a “creepier” aspect.

*NOTE: a preprint is a scientific article just posted online, while the authors submit it to journals, so other scientists have not taken a deep look at it to say whether it’s good or bad. It could be good! It could be bad! We do not know. Interestingly, one of the preprints has been withdrawn, while the scientists reanalyze their data. But that again does not mean it’s good or bad! Science takes a long time. It’s iterative, it’s possible the findings will not change, or maybe they will! And it doesn’t affect this post, which is about how people react to the ideas put forth, not whether or not the ideas hold water.

What I find interesting about this story is not that cats were sacrificed to the gods in ancient Egypt. We know for a fact that they were, there are mummified cats in museums all over the world. They sacrificed cats. As well as dogs, baboons, rams, lizards. Some cats may even have gotten mummified rats.

No what I find really interesting about this is the framing. The framing that being bred for sacrifice is creepy. That it’s somehow a “wrong” way to domesticate something. That it reveals something deep and unsettling and violent about ourselves.

Why? Domesticating animals to eat them doesn’t cause such a shudder. What is the difference? Why is one idea “creepy,” and the other simply normal? I would argue there’s actually nothing creepy about it. The difference isn’t in eating vs. sacrifice, but in our relationship with the animals in question. And if there’s anything unsettling about it, it’s how quickly, and deeply, we draw lines between one animal and another.

DISCLAIMER: I love cats. I have two cats, both originally local dumpster babies, and I spend far too much money and time on their precious little toebeans. I love them deeply. This is not about whether we love cats. It’s about how we judge what people used to do with them.

Sacrificial meals

First I want to delve into the idea of animal sacrifice as being inherently creepy and weird. To our modern, Global North sensibilities, at best we think it’s something we’re too civilized to do anymore. At worst, we associate it with witchcraft, or other religions or groups we wish to demean, to see as “less civilized” in some way.

But animal sacrifice is not forgotten. Egyptians certainly did it. It is highly prominent in the Bible, Old and New Testaments. When Jesus was born, Joseph went and sacrificed two pigeons in thanks (this was the amount by law that you were supposed to). The main issue between Jews, Early Christians, and Rome was not THAT they were supposed to sacrifice. Everyone sacrificed. At issue was to WHOM they were supposed to spill the blood of animals. Judaism only really stopped doing animal sacrifice because of the destruction of the Second Temple: Because there was nowhere TO do the sacrifices.

We also know there were required ways that ritual sacrifices had to be treated before death. They had to be clean, healthy. There is a bit of evidence that cats in Egypt were raised in temples, which means they may have been well cared for.

People still practice animal sacrifice all over the world, in many religions, and I’m not calling them out because of the stigma that some people will place on it. But it’s not old or out of date. Many times the animal is a sheep, goat, or cow, and often it is eaten after sacrifice.

So what, after all, is the difference between raising an animal for sacrifice, and raising an animal to eat it without first giving a deity its due?

Making normality

Humans have created domestic relationships with many species: pigeons, chickens, cows, sheep, pigs, ducks, to name a few, with the full purpose of eating them and their offspring. In large scale farming operations, they are killed and processed in ways that, honestly, would probably be considered ritualistic by future archaeologists, if you think of anything done over and over in a very choreographed set of movements as a ritual.

It is not, fundamentally, different from what could have happened if Egyptians were using cats for ritual purposes. The exception is that the cats were not eaten.

Many of us feel distaste when we think too hard about where meat comes from. And perhaps this is part of the creep factor. Many of us in the Global North have grown deeply unaccustomed to thinking too hard about our food. We see a chicken, cute and feathered and fluffy, and then we see a chicken leg, and our minds easily insert a nice blank into what happened in between.

Others might have an easier time thinking of animals raised for meet as far from them, controlled, sterile. If they think of them at all.

Meanwhile, our relationship with cats has undergone a dramatic shift to become closer than ever. While some cats still take on mice and act as barn cats, many lived pampered lives, so very close to us. They sit on our laps, they sleep under our chins. To think of harming something that we see as small, delicate, dependable, and helpless becomes unthinkable. How could anyone do such a thing?

I’ve seen this play out in other contexts as well, when cats cause ecological harms to endangered species. When there are rats on an island eating seabirds, we will drop millions of tons of poison to kill them all. But when it’s cats on an island eating seabirds, suddenly we want them humanely trapped, neutered, and allowed to live out their lives. The rats and the cats arrived on the island the same way: Via humans. They are committing the same harms. But we think about them in very different ways.

What’s different is our beliefs, and what’s surprising is how quickly, and how deeply, they can change. How many people have given up animal products after confronting the realities of factory farming? It’s enough to make quite a few people exchange one belief for another, very passionately held one. Others go into conservation and find their desire to never kill anything butting up against the need to rid an ecosystem of an invader. Again, beliefs change, and the results are often just as passionate.

People might criticize both sets of those beliefs. But they would not call them creepy. Instead, “creepy” often comes into play when there is disgust, stigma. Often there’s racism or other hatreds, reasons to develop a moral disgust of someone else’s actions. As I talk about in my book, disgust is a fundamental emotion, but one that can be stretched to encompass moral frameworks, including things like racism, homophobia, nationalism and more. In our culture, we have stretched our disgust to include animal sacrifice—with a neat little steak-shaped carve out for our meals.

The final soupçon on this is of course the mummy factor. Mummies are in our cultural nightmares as big bads to be defeated. A cat mummy seems like insult to moral injury. Never mind that, to the people doing these sacrifices, these mummies were sacred. Holy. Important.

Whether cats were originally bred for sacrifice, or associated with for their pest-hunting prowess, I cannot say.* But I can say that the creepiness, or not, of how humans associated with cats has to do not with what historical humans were doing, but how modern humans think about it.

References

• Sean Doherty, et al. Redefining the timing and circumstances of cat domestication, their dispersal trajectories, and the extirpation of European wildcats. bioRxiv 2025.03.28.645877; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2025.03.28.645877

• M. De Martino, et al. The dispersal of domestic cats from Northern Africa and their introduction to Europe over the last two millennia. bioRxiv 2025.03.28.645893; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2025.03.28.645893

*NOTE: If you ask me, I think it most likely that cats were already hanging around for pest hunting and the animal sacrifice contribution to the gene pool was later, and happened to form a very large influx into the domesticated cat population due to trade networks at that time, which is why it ended up contributing such a big chunk to the shift from F. silvestris to F. silvestris domesticus. But don’t ask me, I’m not an archaeologist.

Where have you been?

• I love this idea: Deploying drones in Oregon to "haze" wolves away from livestock. The drones play the sounds of gunfire. fireworks. AC/DC, and...the argument from Marriage Story. “I need the wolves to respond and know that, hey, humans are bad.”

• See a dead deer by the side of the road, and the next day it’s gone. Where did it go? If it’s in DC, these two men picked it up. Nationwide there are people like this, and we should all appreciate them.

• The em dash is here to defend itself. “I am the OG vibe shift.”

Where have I been?

• First: I will be in Takoma Park, MD, to give a book talk at The People’s Book on September 25! It’s a free event at a fabulous local bookstore, and I’d love to see you all there!

• What gave us the potato? An ancient tomato, another ancient plant, and a 9 million year old love affair. We raise our fries in praise.

• Did you know that by the time sweat is dripping off you the dead part of your skin has already been completely soaked? Also if you stop sweating, and start again, the salt layer left behind means the second soak is faster.

My DragonCon Schedule!

• Title: Put the YOU Back in YouTube: Using Social Media to Gain REAL Followers
  Description: BOTS BE GONE! Let's focus on REAL people. YouTube (and social media) can be overwhelming, but you don't have to lose your authentic self in the process. Join me as we discuss building a genuine audience who values you and your content, while keeping your brand and voice consistent.
  Time: Fri 07:00 pm
  Location: Galleria 7 Hilton (Length: 1 Hour)

• Title: Silly Sounding Science & Really Remarkable Results
  Description: No, really! Scientists are giving rats massages, running shrimp on treadmills, and measuring how long it takes different animals to pee, all in the name of science! Let's explore the serious science behind seemingly silly studies.
  Time: Fri 08:30 pm
  Location: Crystal Ballroom Hilton (Length: 1 Hour)

• Title: Monsterotica Romantasy Biology Class (Mature Audience)
  Description: How do you Milk a Minotaur? What do you do when your Werewolf partner has a headache? How does one mate with a dragon in human form anyway? (Mature Audience)
  Time: Fri 10:00 pm
  Location: Capitol Ballroom N/C Courtland Grand (Length: 1 Hour)

• Title: "We Have Wolves At Home": Dire Wolves, Dodos, and De-Extinction
  Description: Are scientists really bringing Ice Age creatures back from the dead? Is that even possible or responsible? Let's explore the science, the ethics, and the reality of de-extinction.
  Time: Sat 04:00 pm
  Location: 209-211 Hilton (Length: 1 Hour)

• Title: Wild Butts of the Animal Kingdom!
  Description: Getting rid of waste is a serious problem life has to deal with so, how does it? There's the familiar 'in one end, out the other'... there's regurgitation... Let's take a look at how they do the doo-doo!
  Time: Sat 07:00 pm
  Location: Grand East Hilton (Length: 1 Hour)

• Title: Go The !#% To Sleep: Effects of Sleep Deprivation
  Description: It's Monday of DragonCon and we bet you're feeling a bit yawn* sleepy. Grab some coffee and join us to learn what science says about the effects of sleep deprivation on your body and mind.
  Time: Mon 01:00 pm
  Location: 209-211 Hilton (Length: 1 Hour)