This is on the media's midweek podcast. I'm Brooke Gladstone. In last week's show we aired an interview with Catherine Hughes, the author of the new book Catland, Louis Wayne, and the Great Cat Mania. And we heard lots of appreciation from so many listeners, and their familiars, that we're releasing an

extended cut for you this week. In Hughes's book she traces the many meanings ascribed to

cats and their guardians because cruelty to cats whether drowning stoning

stomping or exploding has a long tradition and early on Hughes

describes the notorious case in 1730 of the Great Cat massacre in Paris.

Yeah, it's an extraordinary event.

Two apprentices in Paris

became really, really outraged because they discovered

that their master's wife, in effect their mistress,

was feeding her pet cat much nicer food than she was giving them. And this just seemed

absolutely outrageous to these teenage boys.

So they rounded up all the cats in the area

and staged a sort of mock trial in the courtyard.

The charge against these cats was that they were living at a rate of

extravagance that was far, far too good for them. Very unsurprisingly, these poor cats were

found guilty and the apprentices then slaughtered all the cats.

They hung them didn't they?

Some of them were hung and Lagries the mistress of cat was smashed with an iron bar

so that her spine broke.

So slaughtered, the lowest of the low,

they are restored to their most abject kind of state.

So in the late 1800s, one scene as mangy mouse hunters relegated to back alleys and

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