A former minister says that in 2020, the government considered plans to cull our furry friends. For a nation of animal lovers, it would have been the final straw
Cast your mind back to 2020, because chances are you’ve repressed it. There’s a novel coronavirus on the loose and millions of people are locked down in their homes. Some have been furloughed, others sacked. Everyone’s life plans, from holidays, weddings and trying for a baby, to house moves, funerals and exams, are cancelled. The feverish languish in their beds, and the healthy wonder when they’ll succumb. In the absence of air traffic, the birdsong is insanely loud, and punctuated by sirens. In the streets, people yell at each other for getting too close, and loitering with a coffee in a park might get you reprimanded through a megaphone. In the space of a few short weeks, the world is unrecognisable, and it would all be a bit comical if it wasn’t so scary and sad. Yet little did you or I know that – according to the former health minister Lord Bethell – behind closed doors, the government was considering whether or not to mass murder our cats.
I adopted my cat – then a six-week-old kitten – in May 2020. There was a question mark then over whether cats could catch Covid. We know now that it can happen, but rarely and only in a very mild form – although the author Patricia Lockwood noted when hers caught it that it could have some rather dramatic gastric symptoms that don’t bear thinking about. Amid the panic about the spread of the virus, we now know that the government thought a possible solution might be a mass slaughter of the nation’s moggies. Why dogs got a free pass, we shall never know.
Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett is a Guardian columnist
