How Cats are Taking Over the World

Posted by Darlene Cheek Jun 11, 2007

If you’ve read Rosemary’s article on Toxoplasma Gondii, she mentions that, “Recent research indicates that the infection can have subtle and long-lasting psychological effects.” Today I found an article that expands on the findings of some of this research and says, “Cat Parasite Affects Everything We Feel and Do.”

Scientist Ken Lafferty has done a research study on how Toxoplasma Gondii could quite possibly alter entire civilizations. He says that approximately half Earth’s population has been infected with Toxoplasma Gondii, and that different cultures have more widespread infections. His goal was to find out if, the more people who owned cats, the more were infected with the parasite, and how little or how much would that change their society.

Apparently, women who have been infected “tend to be warm, outgoing and attentive to others, while infected men tend to be less intelligent and probably a bit boring. But both men and women who are infected are more prone to feeling guilty and insecure.” The affects can go as far as causing schizophrenia or causing hyperactivity and low IQ’s in children.

Even Lafferty says this is the strangest project he’s ever worked on! I thought it was especially funny that rats that are infected with the parasite will actually surrender themselves to a cat and will even just “hang out” amongst cats. He says that with cats’ diets today, it is highly unlikely that humans will actually catch the virus from their cats, but I thought it was an interesting read!