I saw an article a couple of weeks ago on susceptibility of ferrets, cats, dogs, and different domestic animals to SARS-coronavirus-2. The study found that SARS-CoV-2 replicates poorly in dogs, pigs, chickens, and ducks, but efficiently in ferrets and cats. They also found that the virus transmits in cats via respiratory droplets.
The conclusion was cats may get coronavirus, but experts say it's nothing to worry about… yet.
On animals spreading the plague from Daniel Defoe's account on it from A Journal of the Plague Year:
And many people fled out of the city, and out of the infected suburbs, to Wapping, Ratcliff, Limehouse, Poplar, and such places, as to places of security ; and it is not at all unlikely, that their doing this helped to bring the plague that way faster than it might otherwise have come. For, though I am much for people's fleeing away, and emptying such a town as this, upon the first appearance of a like visitation, and that all people, who have any possible retreat, should make use of it in time, and begone; yet I must say, when all that will flee are gone, those that are left and must stand it, should stand stock still where they are, and not shift from one end of the town, or one part of the town, to the other; for that is the bane and mischief of the whole, and they carry the plague from house to house in their very clothes.
Wherefore were we ordered to kill all the dogs and cats? but because, as they were domestic animals, and are apt to run from house to house, and from street to street, so they are capable of carrying the effluvia, or infectious steams, of bodies infected, even in their furs and hair: and therefore it was, that in the beginning of the infection, an order was published by the Lord Mayor, and by the magistrates, according to the advice of the physicians, that all the dogs and cats should be immediately killed, and an officer was appointed for the execution.
It is incredible, if their account is to be depended, what a prodigious number of those creatures were destroyed. I think they talked of forty thousand dogs, and five times as many cats; few houses being without a cat, some having several, sometimes five or six in a house. All possible endeavors were used also to destroy the mice and rats, especially the latter, by laying rats-bane and other poisons for them, and a prodigious multitude of them was also destroyed.
For some strange reason Lady Godiva spring to my mind, so here’s some
Betsy Russell and other Lady Godiva impersonators
found at Mr. Skin.
