The owners of pets were at risk of being taken to the stake ...

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   Nowadays, pets are part of our everyday lives and inseparable fellow travellers. At the 7th International Congress on Animal-Human Relations, "Animals, Health and Quality of Life", Professor James A. Serpell spoke on the origins and evolution of this relationship. 

  In his presentation, James A. Serpell, professor at the University of Pennsylvania, emphasized the fact that although nowadays the presence of pets in our homes is overwhelming and their integration into our family lives increases day by day, this is something that would have been completely inconceivable in the recent past. Professor Serpell gave as an example the current cohabitation situation that is taking place in the United States, where in 2005, 63% of households had at least one pet, and 45% had more than one. However, as noted, the relationship between humans and animals has not always been so positive as it is nowadays; in fact, it has gone through very dark periods, as the one that took place in England about five hundred years ago.

    The history of the relationship between men and pets started at the dawn of our civilization, when both discovered how beneficial their friendship could be. However, their history – as any other story – is not free from conflicts and lack of understanding. Probably the darkest period of their relationship took place in England, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. According to Professor Serpell, during that period in that country, –which is nowadays very popular for their love of animals, – the owners of pets could run the risk of being accused of witchcraft and be executed.

    As stated by the British historian Keith Thomas, witchcraft trials held in England maintained that witches were assisted by demons and ghosts in the form of animals. For that reason, the possession of cats, dogs, mice or birds, which were the typical pets of that period, was considered in many cases as irrefutable evidence to condemn a large number of people to the stake. In fact, in 1604, King James I of England approved a law that officially made it a crime «to consult, deal, invite, use, feed or reward ghosts under animal form in any way».

    The worst thing about this law was that possessing pets was especially dangerous if the owner was poor, old or not well-esteemed by the community.… In these cases, the risk of being executed after being accused of witchcraft was quite high. This was life in England four hundred years ago; however, this situation was not exclusive to this nation. Art provides evidence of the way in which animals used to be related to witchcraft in other countries. In the fifteenth century, the Witches' Sabbath painted by the German artist Hans Baldung Grien showed a cat behind a witch. In Goya's art, the series of paintings devoted to witchcraft shows the devil in the form of a billy-goat escorted by two cats.… These are just two examples of how dark that period was for pets. Unfortunately, today, in the twenty-first century, there are still some countries that take very reprehensible decisions with regard to pets, such as China, for instance.

Pets and humans, the history of their relationship. | Affinity Petcare (affinity-petcare.com). Text slightly modified.