How Did Ancient People Treat Their Pets?

How did ancient people treat their pets, and did they love their animals the way we do? This deep dive into ancient pets breaks down the dogs Egyptians named and buried like nobles, the cats they revered as gods, and the eel one Roman loved more than his three wives. Ancient people were every bit as attached to their animals as we are, and sometimes it got strange. This video traces it. Egyptians wrote their dogs' names on collars, more than seventy of which survive, from Brave One and Blacky to one dog somebody simply called "Useless," and killing a named, collared dog could carry the death penalty. A pharaoh gave his guard dog Abuwtiyuw a full state funeral around 4,300 years ago, a royal coffin and a mason-built tomb, and Romans paid stonecutters to carve loving epitaphs for their dogs, including a lapdog named Margarita whose marble poem still speaks in her own voice in the British Museum. Then the cats, revered as tied to the goddess Bastet, protected so fiercely that a mob once killed a Roman over a dead cat while the king's own officials watched. And the truly odd end of it: the roughly 180,000 mummified Egyptian cats dug up in the 1800s and shipped to England to be ground into farm fertilizer. We get into the Romans who kept jeweled pet eels and held funerals for talking ravens, and finish 14,000 years ago in an Ice Age grave in Germany, where someone kept a dying puppy alive for weeks it could never repay, then buried it beside their own family. This bond didn't start with Egypt. It might be one of the oldest things we do. If you got something out of this one, drop a like and subscribe for more. I dig into a new curious question like this regularly. ⏱️ CHAPTERS 0:00 — How far you'd go for a pet 1:00 — The dog named "Useless" 2:34 — A funeral fit for a king 4:08 — Kill a cat, lose your life 6:04 — Jeweled eels and a famous raven 8:09 — The 14,000-year-old grave 📚 SOURCES Abuwtiyuw and Egyptian dog names — Reisner's inscription, via World History Encycl