Behind the Scenes Minis: Kitties and Smallpox

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Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff you Missed in History Class, a production of I Heart Radio, Hello and Happy Friday. I'm Holly Fry, I'm Tracy B. Wilson. Crazy. We talked about kitties this week. We sure did, UH that it was to be a little bit of a ball save for some of our less delightful episodes that we've done. Uh. In particular, I had researched the one on swill milk right before this, and it was too much. I absolutely loved looking through various lists about famous historical cats, but what I really enjoyed was once I had narrowed my list and started doing research. I mean, this always happens right anytime you look at and I'm not dogging any writers who do these like listicles that are like short, here are some famous things in a group. A lot of nuance always gets left out because it's just the nature of of how those things work. So I'm always delighted when I uncover all of the various deeper research and information about any of them. For example, the the fact that, like Richard the Third, scholars have talked about this whole story with Wyatt and whether or not it's kind of overblown to make Richard the Third look bad and like this weird cat portion of it being involved. M I love all of that. I love that portrait of Wyatt with his cat friend staring at him like, look, I brought you dinner, and he's just kind of spaced out looking else there. I love all of it. But as I said, my very favorite, even though unsingable, Sam, is much loved in cat story circles, it's Mike the cat. Yeah, Mike the cat. I want to time travel to not hug you or try to hug you and get my face clowed off. I feel like my brother's childhood allergies have become like a running theme recent episodes of the show. We should just do an episode about that. Um I I wanted a cat from the time I learned the word cat. Uh. And my brother, who's a couple of years younger than me, had various allergies, and I don't I don't remember if we knew he was allergic to cats, or if we suspected that a cat would be a problem. And so my parents are like, no cats. Because we also lived on a very very busy road was not a safe place to have outdoor cats, which was a thing more people were okay with in nine. So we had these family friends who had this mean old tom cat that you know, lived at their their their farm or their uh, I don't know if it was an I don't know there was an actual functioning farm, but like they had property that was even more in the country than we were. And I remember walking down the sidewalk walking past the cat, and the cat, unprompted, just clawing the back of my leg, and not even that was enough to dem my love for cats. Oh yeah, which continued until we found a stray in the backyard who was terrified of the road. Um, and then that continued to be my cat all the way until college. Oh yeah. I mean I think I mentioned on this show before, right, Like I grew up on kind of a little farm situation and we always had dogs and never cats, and I too was like I want kiddies, I mean, I wanted everything, but um, when we moved to Florida from Washington State and it was no longer a farm situation. I remember one day on the way home from Saturday morning ballet class, my dad drove me to a place where they had cats, said, I pick out at kitten UM, and I picked out a little black kitten and do you know that cat which was um that we had that one in another growing up um, as well as a couple of of manx is. But she lived until I was in my thirties, um, my early thirties, So she lived a very long life even though she was an outdoor cat. You look at statistics, you know, outdoor cats usually live significantly shorter lives than indoor cats. Not always, they're clearly outliers, UM. And I know that's a big debate in a hot button issue that people will argue and argue about, and I do not wish to wait into that. Listen to your veterinarians advice. It's all I can tell you. My cats are indoor only aside from it being safer for the local bird population, I have too much anxiety about their safety to let them leave the house. Um. They have plenty of enrichment and activity to stir up in here. UM. So they all are very you know, they get their needs meant But yes, so Boo Boo as her name was, lived a very very long time and really started my lifelong love of cats. And of course I've had many since then, and continue to uh, and I see how people would want to immortalize cats with big characters like Mike and unsinkable Sam. That's a great story. Yeah, I wandered into a portion of the Internet where people today are still actively arguing about whether or not his story is true. Um. It just goes to show you how passionately people feel both about animals and about um the lore that grows up around them. You know, they're there are people that love that story so much, and they're like, let me just believe this story, and they will refute every argument and have reasons to explain the disparate photographic evidence. If you want to believe it. It hurts nothing is where I'm at. I think there's an old, old episode the archive about the Bismarck, and I have no knowledge of whether it talks about a cat at all. I don't either. I didn't actually listen to that one because it is quite a ways back and it could be a little hard to access sometimes. But um, yeah, I like doing these fun ones. It's kind of like when we did our Hellhounds episode in October. I love them. They're super fun to to look at different ways people have memorialized and talk about and folklore eyes for lack of a better word, um stories about animals. They lend themselves to kind of becoming urban legend and folklore because it's not like the cat ever gave its own account of how things went, so we can people that tell the story can kind of imprint what they want on it um without the actual key player ever contradicting it, which is very funny. I did read a tidbit that I didn't include in the mic story that there was you know, he wandered all over pretty openly. He wasn't a right of being around people. He just didn't want to be petted and you know, picked up and and fussed over. And there was one of the areas of one of the gates at the British Museum that he knew that if he was over there, he had a way that he could get up high on the gatehouse and get away from people and just stare at them, which is pretty cute. But he would also apparently hang out in the reading room and as long as nobody bugged him, he's perfectly fine there. He didn't seem to want to go after anyone. He just just let me do my things, just yeah, don't touch me, me, my thing, my hang out. I'm gonna eat the fish that people are cooking for me. We started with a caterer cat and end up with a catered to cat, which is kind of not by design, but how it worked out well. And and having gone to extreme lengths to feed a cat who was, you know, approaching the end of her life. Yeah, I'm I'm there for the making of fish and chicken. Oh he was getting that all the time though, that wasn't they Sure it was very soft at the end, but he was getting cooked for his whole life. I don't know if Mike ever ate a piece of kibble, for example. I think he ate mightily well. Of course, that was before the huge rise in the industrialized pet food concept, so there may not have been kibble available. It's just eating eating yummy things. I love that the waitresses in the little sometimes see it referenced as a cafe and sometimes is a refreshment room. We're giving him scraps every day. I think it's very true. You would think he would have liked them more, but apparently, don't touch me, just put down the food and go, which is kind of how I live my own life. So, uh, we hope you enjoyed this one this week. I had so much fun doing it and it was exactly what I needed. This week. On the show, we talked about eradicating smallpox, which, as I said, I was when convinced we had already covered. Yeah. One of the things that we did not get into in the episode, um in part because it's it's not uh, it's not an easy thing to actually calculate for real. But sometimes you will see numbers about like how cost effective the vaccine program was, and like how many millions of dollars countries invested into it versus how many millions of more dollars they saved by not having to response to smallpox outbreaks or treat people for smallpox, or have all of the ongoing social and economic issues of people whose family members died of smallpox. And I wound up just leaving that out of the episode because I am tired of talking about people as though we are dollars. Yeah. I think that's fair. I mean, I understand the need for that kind of analysis, but it does tend to kind of dehumanize the whole situation. Yeah, yeah, Yeah. There are also entire books that look at like particularly the US involvement through a more foreign policy lens and looking at cold war politics and that kind of stuff, And that is just not the lens that I took to look at this particular thing. Uh again, because I was mostly more interested in the idea of saving human lives and stopping a many thousands of year old deadly disease from freely circulating on the planet. That was where my focus was this time. Yeah, I mean I could see where that might be top of mind these times we're living in it's um I feel myself often vacillating kind of being like, oh, I'm hopeful things we get better and then it'll just tanksit. So this hopefully will be a balmb for people on the same I think a lot of us around that roller coaster. Yea, yeah, I I have um a a weekly dinner um with a friend of mine that for the period of the pandemic when vaccines didn't exist yet and a lot of times like the risk was really high in our area, like that, whole time, we had a virtual lunch. We would get on our Google hangout or our zoom or whatever, and we would have our virtual lunch. And then when we were both vaccinated. We transferred that into being in person but outdoors, and we the last time that we had had dinner, we had this conversation about how frustrating it had been here in Massachusetts to have had basically a three week span where everything in Massachusetts, like the entire Commonwealth of Massachusetts, was marked as low risk in terms of COVID transmission, and at that point, like the numbers were escalating everywhere and have continued to escalate since then. And we talked about feeling, um simultaneously frustrated with that trajectory and having felt like we sort of saw we saw an improvement on the horizon and then the fortunes reversed, while simultaneously knowing that like there are a whole lot of the world has barely any access to vaccines at all at this point, and um, you know, as things were improving overall in the United States, there was just a humanitarian catastrophe happening in India with its COVID levels, and it's all interlocks together, um, with both smallpox and render pest. One of the things that we've talked about is like, when you have a global disease, it cannot be addressed through just a piece meal everybody taken their own path. Kind of a situation like a global pandemic requires a global effort, and I don't know if we're ever gonna have one it. I mean, that's the thing, right like, and that's the hopeless moment is it does not feel like it. I don't know how to cure it. Greater months than I will hopefully figure it out and I will do my best to help um. One of the things that also struck me while I was working on this, and I might have said something similar when we did that, that sort of how we're doing at the very beginning of the pandemic episode. Working on this really made me think about how my parents were born before small box was eradicated in the United States. My parents are old enough to remember when polio was circulating within the United States, which polio no longer really a problem in the United States, but still a big problem in other parts of the world, And how in a lot of ways, I feel really fortunate that it has taken me this long into my life to be in a situation where there is a disease that is spread through the air that is potentially lethal. In this way as with the COVID nineteen pandemic, which just was not part of my experience before this part. Like I'm I'm old enough to remember the start of the AIDS crisis, which was also terrifying. But HIV is also not airborne, which is a different level of risk and fear involved. Although I'm old enough to remember when we didn't really know how HIV was spread, so that was that was a scarier time for um that particular disease. It continues to be scary because access to drugs to treat HIV continues to be a huge problem. Yeah, I mean, I am. I think I've talked about on the show. I have done AIDS Walk with the same team every single year, and it's like, you still hear about how there are there is a perception that that is done and we've handled it, and it's like no, no, no, no, no, there is still there are still people that need help. There are still people you know, there are still new cases on occasion. There are still people that need outreach and support and community help. And so I also wonder if our current situation will similarly be a thing that goes on and on forever, and some people will I mean we already know some people act as though we are through it when we are clearly not. Um. It's a On the one hand, I wish I could like be an alien observing all of this from a remove because it is a fascinating right, you know, all of the mechanisms in place and how reactions have varied and what's led to those is fascinating to look at. But unfortunately it is more immediately concerning because we are not aliens that live far away and can look at this like a weird Petrie dish. It is our, our planet where we live of with other people. Yeah. I similarly think about how if they're still podcasts and a hundred years, what hundred years from now podcasters are going to say about things that are happening Right all the time I think about that, like how is this going to be reported and perceived and and what will they get wrong? Just as I mean we, you know, we in the bigger sense you and I certainly at times, and the much wider sense the general understanding of the past on the part of humanity get stuff wrong. Um, Like, how how is this going to be perceived? How will the history books get written about it? Yeah, it's still a weird time to be humans. Yeah. Yeah, And I mean, as we've it's been a while since we've touched on this, I feel like because for a while, but it's, as we said, it seems like it's seemed like things were improving somewhat, but like you and I both have a lot of things sheltering us from a lot of the worst aspects of the pandemic, and it's still scary and frustrating. So our thoughts are with all the folks who are you know, in in situations that are worse than ours, UM and including uh parents who are wrestling with UM sending kids to school right now as of this moment, I mean, by the time this episode comes out, a lot of schools are going to have been back in session for a period of weeks. But see how that goes. We're kind of yeah, as we record, we are right at that point where some schools have gone back, others are are about to go back. Some schools have gone back in four days later, gone back to remote learning because there were too many cases. So anyway, uh man, I was trying to lead this to a a happier moment to close on this particular episode for this thing that I chow is to feel a little more optimistic for the show, and then we broke it. We did um So anyway, I hope everybody's weekend is as RESTful and and fun as possible. Whatever it is, it's on your plate. We'll be back tomorrow with a classic episode and Monday with something brand new. Stuff you missed in History Class is a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.