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From Meat Eaters World News headquarters in Bozeman, Montana,

this is Cow's Week in Review with Ryan Cal-Alla. Here's Cal.

We may be getting closer to finding patient zero of one of the most consequential outbreaks in

human history. In this case, I'm not talking about the bubonic plague. I'm talking, of course,

about cats. A recent study in the journal

American antiquity has identified the remains of what might be the earliest domestic cats in

the Americas. They were discovered in the wreck of the Emanuel Point 2, a Spanish ship that was

run aground by a storm in 1559 near what's now Pensacola Bay. This proves that cats were

aboard the earliest ships to reach our shores, and now we know a lot about how they lived and what

brought them here. Isotopic analysis of the cat's bones tell us that their diet was mostly fish,

either fed to them or scavenged from the sailors on board, and not the rats and mice

that were also found in the shipwreck. This confirms something we know about contemporary

cats, that they typically don't hunt out of desire for food, but rather for the thrill of the

hunt. The authors of the study also suggest that the cats were maybe so good at killing rats

that there weren't

enough of them left on the ship to subsist on. Of course, the cats weren't so good at killing

rats that they prevented rats from leaving European ships and spreading throughout the Americas.

One other interesting tidbit from this study, the authors conclude that these cats were not brought along

as a food source, despite the existence of a Spanish cookbook from the year 1560 that includes a

recipe for roast cat. Now, listen, I know the idea of establishing a regulated cat hunt in the U.S.

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