Would you kill your pet if ordered to by the gov't?

[JackiePlace]

I read in the news this morning that at the beginning of the Covid crisis the gov't considered ordering the culling of all domestic cats in order to prevent the spread of Covid. This idea was later abandoned after it was proven that cats couldn't transmit Covid to humans.
AIBU to think that this would have caused a mass uprising? We are a nation of animal lovers, after all. Or would people have accepted it as they did some of the other draconian regulations (not visiting dying relatives, etc).

www.lbc.co.uk/news/govt-cat-cull-covid-pandemic/

Totally factual what she has written. Not gross at all.

In response to this.

This actually happened during the Great Plague of London in 1665. It was a big mistake.

By mid July in 1665 over 1,000 deaths per week were reported in the city. It was rumoured that dogs and cats spread the disease, so the Lord Mayor ordered all the dogs and cats destroyed. Author Daniel Defoe in his Journal of the Plague Years estimated that 40,000 dogs and 200,000 cats were killed.

The real effect of this was that there were fewer natural enemies of the rats who carried the plague fleas, so the germs spread more rapidly.

In the top 20 biggest killers in all of recorded history, most of which were pre-antibiotics and pre-vaccine is hardly ‘lame’. And that’s without taking into account the millions still suffering with covid complications and long covid.

It’s not factual that covid is a mild cold.

We'd be on the run with our cat as a fugitive - she is a monumental dickhead, but Christ do I love her. Would batter anyone who tried to take her.

If the government and the so-called "science" had claimed cats were spreading covid and had ordered the destruction of your pets, you would have almost definitely complied.

In the unlikely event you had refused, the inevitable condemnation of others (covidiot, granny killer, covid denier, etc) would have been your reward.

I definitely wouldn't have complied. I was called all sorts on here for admitting I got closer than 2m to my neighbours on VE Day. I was also called thick and various other terms for buying chocolate at the corner shop when one of us went out for milk. We shouldn't have been going there for milk as it wasn't essential so buying chocolate made us the work of the devil.

No amount of name calling or abuse would have made me harm my cat.

This thread is reminding me of one a few years ago where a poster said she would run into a burning building to save her dog and leave a baby in there.

How can you begin to address that kind of insanity, other than feel very sorry for those so lacking in humanity? What sad lives they must have led.

Ach that’s hard to read. Poor baby

Hypothetical ‘baby’ thankfully

Yes, the Who Would You Save threads are utterly silly and goady.

Would you save your loved companion of many years or a hypothetical baby? No one knows how they will react in an extreme situation and the vast majority of people do the right thing, but faced with a goady thread they answer accordingly.

PinkSparklyPussyCat

Your post makes my point. The small number of people who failed to comply with restrictions - or who were perceived not to be complying - were easy to vilify by the mob, because there were so few of them, particularly in the first lockdown.

Such was the hysteria that many people genuinely believed they were not allowed to buy chocolate (and irrationally that purchasing Easter eggs could be potentially life-threatening); or, that we were limited to exercising once a day for no more than an hour. Neither of these were ever mandatory restrictions. Even Mark Drakeford didn't ban the purchase of chocolate when he introduced his restrictions on non-essential purchases.

People were so scared that they were prepared to do (or not do) things that seem completely ridiculous in hindsight and I believe that if people believed that their pets could potentially kill them and their loved ones, or that they would have to face the condemnation of their community that most (obviously not all) would have allowed the destruction of their pets.

Don't forget, there were normally sane and rational people putting their post in quarantine and disinfecting their shopping. If they thought it was possible to catch covid from a letter or a can of beans, how much more likely is it that they could be persuaded they could catch it from a living mammal such as their pet cat?

Don't forget, there were normally sane and rational people putting their post in quarantine and disinfecting their shopping. @AnwenDolly Haha... I'm still doing both of those things! … On the advice of my brother in law who is a biochemist. I haven't had Covid (touch wood) so maybe there is something in it?!

Ha! Ha! indeed, but if you really are doing those things (do you ever go out, meet friends or touch "things"?) it's rather sad, not funny that you haven't been able to move on like the rest of the world.

I suppose we could engage in a game of my (insert family member or friend) who is a (insert description of supposed "expert") says...

...but it would be fairly tedious and quite unhelpful. If quarantined post and disinfected shopping helps you sleep at night, go for it, but it might be more useful to get some help for your phobia.

As for your biochemist brother-in-law (if he exists), he really shouldn't be feeding your anxiety with his nonsense.

I got caught up in the hysteria a bit at the beginning but got past it pretty quickly. DH asked me if I thought it was safe to have a takeaway and I told him that I was having one but if he was worried he could cook himself something. I also told him that if he wanted to wash shopping he could crack on but not to expect any help from me. I may have been a bit unsympathetic...

Sir David Spiegelhalter was on the radio earlier and he also said it was amazing how much our behaviour changed.

I got caught up in the early stages too but once I realised how the headlines and daily numbers were so effective as a campaign it was much easier to step out of that cycle.

Once you did you could see the damage it was causing against the low risk to most. It was frustrating though as people post it’s ‘easy to be wise after the event’ - that’s not right many were saying it at the time they just got a load of abuse instead.

My experience was similar in a few ways to PinkSparkly and Marsha.

I was sufficiency scared in the first few weeks of the first lockdown that I was willingly compliant (although I never disinfected shopping or quarantined post).

We were given to believe - although the virus was it was mostly dangerous to elderly and vulnerable - that any one of us, including children - could die of it.

After a month or so, I no longer wanted to be compliant, but I was forced to be. Everything apart from "essential" shops and services were closed and we were led to believe that the police were patrolling every street corner and prosecuting anyone who strayed too far from home.

In order to meet up with people, you had to find others who were willing to break the law and expose your own willingness to people who might judge you negatively. No one I know admitted at the time that they would have or did break the law.

That is why I remained compliant pretty much to the end of restrictions. Not because I agreed with them, or that I was scared anymore, but because I feared the disapproval of others.

Fear of death and fear of the disapproval of others are powerful motivators and were used effective weapons against us during the lockdowns.

We have a knob of a neighbour who has her precious chickens out all the time, even though the government advice is that they spread bird flu and she lives a few meters away from a river where a huge number of wildfowl recently died. But hey, her chickens are special!

I hate those types of questions too, especially when someone then gets attacked for their answer. Why would my dog and a strange baby be in a building together with no one else? If you want to say "poor baby" because I would save my dog, then perhaps you should point the blame for the demise of the baby on it's parents.

Tbh I didn’t see the thread and thought it was the poster’s own baby which felt harsh. But then again given some of the posts on this thread in general keeping.

I’ve been on mn long enough to know some would save their dog over a stranger’s baby. No comment on that really. I don’t care enough about made up choices that hopefully don’t need to be made anyway.

If they had announced this, the Government would actually have been toppled and replaced by Larry the cat.

People always prefer the cat to the PM at any one time. I feel like this would have been the last straw for a nation of animal lovers.

I’ve had it twice. Mild cold both times. Everyone I know has had it, including my 90 year old grandma who is in a nursing home. Cold.

Oh my, I wonder if Boris would have done Larry in with his bolt gun?!

So millions died of something else then? There's wiser eating grass...!!!

Not for covid. But I could imagine doing this for something more deadly and dangerous or something hideously disfiguring. It perhaps depends on the seriousness of the disease and also how easily it is transmitted via the pet.