Ministers considered killing all cats during pandemic

And other stories from the stranger side of life

A cat

The government considered ordering all pet cats in Britain to be killed in 2020 amid fears they could be spreading Covid, a former health minister has said. “There was a moment we were very unclear about whether domestic pets could transmit the disease,” Lord Bethell told Channel 4 News. “In fact, there was an idea at one moment that we might have to ask the public to exterminate all the cats in Britain. Can you imagine what would have happened if we had wanted to do that?”

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Chas Newkey-Burden has been part of The Week Digital team for more than a decade and a journalist for 25 years, starting out on the irreverent football weekly 90 Minutes, before moving to lifestyle magazines Loaded and Attitude. He was a columnist for The Big Issue and landed a world exclusive with David Beckham that became the weekly magazine’s bestselling issue. He now writes regularly for The Guardian, The Telegraph, The Independent, Metro, FourFourTwo and the i news site. He is also the author of a number of non-fiction books.