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The Internet may never tire of cats, but the people of Ypres, Belgium, sure did — to the point that they created a whole city celebration out of tossing cats to their death from a bell tower.
The practice apparently dates from the Middle Ages, when Ypres, a market town in Flanders, first prospered 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 on what came to be known as “Cats Wednesday” was apparently seen in Ypres as both a practical solution and a source of gruesome entertainment — the more so because popular superstitions linked cats to witchcraft and the devil. According to a history posted online by the city, in the Middle Ages many European towns dealt with feral-cat problems in similarly inhumane ways, but it was Ypres that retained the bloody reputation.
They don’t throw live cats in Ypres any more, of course; that stopped in 1817 after one lucky tabby reportedly landed unscathed (and ran away as fast as it could). But they still ring the bells on the cats’ day each year, and in the 1930s the city brought back the old throwing tradition in a harmless way using stuffed toys and confetti.
Today, the Kattenstoet — the Cat Parade — is a big cultural festival held in Ypres every three years, with cat-themed lectures, music, dance and theater, as well as a grand procession to the bell tower to watch the plush toys plummet. The next one is scheduled for May 13, 2018.
Hello, my name is Jack Sparrow. I'm a 50 year old self-employed Pirate from the Caribbean. 
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