Jerry Moore

has been buried, and he's buried next to his pet cat.

And we know that the cat is a pet because it's got a necklace around it.

It shows no evidence of trauma, so it's been kind of painlessly sacrificed to be with this young man.

And so that's a pretty interesting transformation that takes place.

Oh, absolutely.

Absolutely.

And so, for example, in the new kingdom of ancient Egypt, there was a goddess, Bubatas, who was a goddess of fertility and other sorts of things.

And she was frequently envisioned as being a cat.

And large numbers of

you know, real cats, were mummified and offered in her honor and buried in massive cemeteries on the banks of the Nile.

So massive, in fact, that some of those cemeteries were looted

in the late 1800s, and the mummified animals that were there, cats and other animals, were shipped to England to be used as organic fertilizer.

Oh, I would put, you know, every time an archaeologist say, oh, it only occurred at this time, there's going to be another site that's found that's slightly older.

But I would say that somewhere in between, you know, 10,000 to 15,000 years ago,

In the Near East, we certainly had interactions with cats.

The estimates for the United States, feral cats in the United States, it's estimated between 50 to 70 million feral cats in the United States.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's an enormous number.

And in other places in the world, for example, just last year, New Zealand was in the news because they organized a nationwide hunting event.