Respect Your Cat Day 2022 originates in King Richard II's edict of 1384?

This is rather strange but some authors online are connecting this year's Respect Your Cat Day with Richard II and an edict that he made in 1384 in which he condemned eating cats. It was an early form of respecting the cat. You can see from the short clip from a book listed by Google that the peasants of the time harboured a lot of resentment towards King Richard and they took it out on cats. They killed and ate them by the thousands according to this extract. At the time there were food shortages. They called the King "the royal cat".

I do not know if this is true. However, it is a fact of history that in 1381 there was the Peasants' Revolt which was the first crisis of Richard's reign. He rode out to meet the rebels who were led by Wat Tyler. Tyler was killed and the revolt was crushed. Afterwards Richard began to take control of the government himself, building a group of unpopular favourites.

Richard II of England. Image: Wikipedia.

The extract that I mention begs the question whether peasants of the time i.e. the workers of the day, ate domestic cats. Actually, at that time the domestic cat would have been an outdoor cat and probably better described as a community cat, a bit like the cats you see in developing countries today. It also begs the question as to whether Richard II liked cats and owned a cat. I can't find a record of this but it seems possible bearing in mind his informal title (if it is true).

If the peasants were starving, it is reasonable to suggest that they killed cats and ate them. It would be an early example of cat meat.

RELATED: 10 countries where they eat cat and dog meat (2020).

Today, more than 600 years later, cat meat is still consumed in more than 10 countries in the world. And I am referring to domestic, stray and feral cats. Yes, someone's pet is being killed and eaten somewhere on the planet as you read this, probably.

Exotic SH - bicolor. The flat-face distorts the bone structure causing issues such as teat duct overflow. This is not respecting the cat. Image: video screenshot.

This, of course, goes very much against respecting the cat. Respecting the cat means allowing the domestic cat to behave as naturally as possible. This will lead to contentment. Respecting the cat means relating to your domestic cat is a cat and not a baby. Respecting the cat means not breeding unhealthy cats. And it means caring for feral cats and not just killing them as they do in Australia in the many thousands Humankind should care for feral cats because we put them there through our carelessness.