Given that The Inquisition led to the destruction of all cats in Europe, does that mean that Christianity effectively caused the Black Death?
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8 Jan 2004-10 Dec 2009
ANSWERS: 1
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While the death of cats might have led to an increase in the rat population, it might not have had an appreciable effect on the spread of the Bubonic Plague. There would certainly be more rats in a household, but the fleas on the rats, which actually transmitted the disease, were happy enough to stay on the rat until it died, thus not spreading the disease to humans. If a cat killed a rat, the fleas would abandon the rat and possibly infest the cat, which would subsequently come in close contact to humans and spread the disease, or when it drug the dead rat into a house the fleas could depart there and infest humans directly. While the shortage of cats may have had some effect, it is unlikely to be the sole cause of the epidemic, and besides, the Inquisitors were not really Christians by the standards of many people, even if they called themselves that.
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