The 44th edition of The Cats Festival was an impressive spectacle. Ypres created a celebration out of tossing cats to their death from a bell tower. A practice that dates from the Middle Ages when Ypres propspered as a center of clothmaking.
The city’s warehouses would fill with bales of imported wool waiting to be woven, and bolts of finished cloth waiting to be sold at an annual fair. The warehouses drew mice and rats, which would nest and breed prolifically in an environment like that. To keep the vermin from chewing up the goods, the story goes, merchants would bring in a few hungry cats to hunt them. But the hunters would multiply, too, and by the time of the fair each spring, the place would be overrun with feral cats creating a nuisance of their own. In those crueler times, hurling cats from a great height was apparently seen in Ypres as both a practical solution and a source of gruesome entertainment. They don’t throw live cats in Ypres any more, of course; that stopped in 1817. In 1930 the city brought back the old throwing tradition in a harmless way using stuffed toys and confetti – Ypres, Belgium
The city’s warehouses would fill with bales of imported wool waiting to be woven, and bolts of finished cloth waiting to be sold at an annual fair. The warehouses drew mice and rats, which would nest and breed prolifically in an environment like that. To keep the vermin from chewing up the goods, the story goes, merchants would bring in a few hungry cats to hunt them. But the hunters would multiply, too, and by the time of the fair each spring, the place would be overrun with feral cats creating a nuisance of their own. In those crueler times, hurling cats from a great height was apparently seen in Ypres as both a practical solution and a source of gruesome entertainment. They don’t throw live cats in Ypres any more, of course; that stopped in 1817. In 1930 the city brought back the old throwing tradition in a harmless way using stuffed toys and confetti – Ypres, Belgium
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