A pet gravestone from Hyde Park (wording below). Credit: Eric Tourigny taken with permission of The Royal Parks

In 1885, an elderly Scottish woman decided to bury her cat, Tom, in a nearby cemetery. Though the decision might not seem controversial to us, it caused a riot in Edinburg.

The woman, hoping for a “decent burial” for Tom, had an undertaker create a casket for the cat and employed a gravedigger to dig the grave. The funeral itself was largely attended.

But that’s also where the problems started. Apparently objecting to the burial of an animal like a human, a crowd amassed and denounced the proceedings.  The crowd destroyed the coffin, dug up the cat, and forced the woman to flee from her home.

By the end of the century, however, pet burials had become common, as large pet cemeteries like Hyde Park in London and the Hartsdale Pet Cemetery & Crematory interred hundreds to tens of thousands of dogs, cats, and other animals.

Now, one intrepid scientist has walked the grounds of four of the UK’s largest pet graveyards, taking detailed notes on every gravestone he could. What he’s found won’t surprise anyone who follows this blog: Over the past hundred years, owners have begun to view their pets more like members of the family. As the years went on, pet gravestones were more likely to include the family’s last name, refer to the owner as a parent, and even suggest that the family would meet the pet again in heaven. Here’s one from Hyde Park:

Here Lies My Darling Pixie

Mommy’s Little Angel

Dearly loved and

Missed by his Serena and all who knew him

11.11.1970 – 3. 11. 1976

The changes aren’t surprising, given what I’ve written about our changing relationship with cats and dogs in Citizen Canine. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries–as pet cemeteries were becoming more common–dogs (and eventually cats) began to live indoors in large numbers, thanks to the advent of flea shampoo and kitty litter. Families also grew smaller and more prosperous around this time, giving them more time to dote on their animal companions. And pet food, toys, and medicine became more sophisticated, in some cases rivaling those available to humans. All served to transform dogs and cats from mere companions to bona-fide members of the family.  And now, we’re seeing that evolving relationship play out in pet gravestones.

As for poor Tom, his owner would be heartened to learn that, more than 130 years later, burying a pet in a human graveyard had also ceased being verboten. In 2016, New York made it legal for pets to be buried with their owners in human cemeteries. “Four-legged friends are family for many New Yorkers,” the state’s governor, Andrew Cuomo, said at the time. “Who are we to stand in the way if someone’s final wish includes spending eternity with them.”

(Credit: By Donald Trung Quoc Don (Ch? Hán: ???) – Wikimedia Commons.(Want to use this image?) – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=75874833)

I always enjoy writing about cats and dogs, but I had an especially good time covering this story on ancient dog poop for Science last week.

Here’s the gist: A team of molecular archaeologists (cool job!) had spent six years collecting ancient human feces (recovered from archaeological sites) around the world, in hopes of figuring out how the diet of our species has changed over time. (Such changes are reflected in our microbiome–the vast populations of bacteria that inhabit our guts–and they show up in our poop.). But when they began analyzing their specimens, the data didn’t seem human.

So they created an artificial intelligence program to help them sort human poop from other types of poop. The upshot: A remarkable number of their samples weren’t from people–they were from dogs. In one especially surprising case, feces recovered from a 17th-century chamber pot had been made by a canine. How it got in there, no one knows.

So why is so much dog poop showing up in places where we would expect to find human poop? One obvious answer is that dogs have lived in close quarters with us for thousands of years, even if we haven’t shared our beds with them until recently. Another explanation: Dogs, unlike humans, are more likely to poop out in the open, where a quick dry from the sun might help preserve it.  So a lot more dog poop may be being preserved than human poop.

Whatever the reason, an analysis of these ancient canine feces could reveal important shifts in the human-dog relationship over time. The wolf ancestor of dogs subsisted on a purely carnivorous diet. And early dogs would have too. But as we settled down and began cultivating different types of food (and feeding these scraps to our dogs), our canine companions would have begun to become more omnivorous. First their diet would have changed. Then their microbiome would have changed. And finally, their genes would have changed to adapt to this diet. (We already know that dogs have evolved multiple copies of the gene for amylase, a protein that breaks down starch.)

All of these changes should be reflected in ancient dog feces, allowing us to trace some of the most important timepoints in dog history–all thanks to a bunch of ancient poop.

As we all deal with the new coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, I’ve been reminded of another plague: The Black Death, the most devastating pandemic the world has ever seen. By some estimates, as much as half of Europe’s population perished, and more than 100 million people died across the globe.

As I write in my book, Citizen Canine, some scholars believe that cats could have prevented the plague. That is, if Medieval Europeans hadn’t nearly wiped them out.

The hysteria appears to have begun in 1233 AD when Pope Gregory IX vowed to stamp out what he viewed as the growing threat of paganism in Europe.  As I write in my book:

In his Vox in Rama of 1233, the Pope warns German bishops about an evil in their midst. He describes the initiation ceremony of a cult that meets in caverns beneath homes. The followers light candles and chant. Eventually, he claims, “a black cat… with an upright tail descends backwards down a statue, which is usually at the meeting. The postulant first kisses the cat’s rear, then [so does] the master of the sect, and then the other individuals who are worthy of honor and perfect… Then they face the cat in turn… and say, ‘We know the master… and we obey to you.’” … Finally, a strange creature appears. “His upper body shines with rays brighter than the sun, the lower part is hairy like a cat.”

Gregory IX authorized the use of any and all force to rid Europe of these witches. “No vengeance against them is too harsh,” he wrote. The fate of the cat was sealed. Now seen as an incarnation of Satan, Europeans slaughtered them by the thousands. People stoned them, drowned them, and burned them at the stake.

In Classical Cats, historian Donald Engels estimates that by 1700 tens of millions of the animals had been massacred throughout Europe. In some villages it was impossible to find a cat, and black ones were virtually unheard of. Felines are master hunters, and without enough cats around, Europe’s rodent population exploded. Plague-carrying black rats swarmed the continent and grew to unprecedented size.

So could cats have stopped black rats, and the spread of what came to be known as “The Black Death”? We may never know. But I’m still grateful to have my two little demons at home.