A toxic relationship

“First the doctor told me the good news: I was going to have a disease named after me!” - Steve Martin

My wife’s doctor told her not to clean the litter box when she was pregnant. He said doing so would expose her – and our unborn child – to a parasite that causes blindness and mental disabilities. He failed to say cleaning the litter box while pregnant might also transform an unborn child into a global soccer superstar.

Apparently, it can. 

In fact, there appears to be a correlation between toxoplasma gondii, a parasite found in cat waste, and World Cup championships. According to a paper written by a graduate student at the Stanford School of Medicine, Toxoplasma gondii makes men hyper-aggressive, and therefore really good at running around and kicking a ball while occasionally headbutting each other. 

Toxoplasma gondii is found in many mammals, but it can usually only reproduce in the stomachs of cats. In order to get there, it must first get into food that cats want to eat. So, when a mouse or rat eats a little bit of  “toxo” (as scientists call it), the parasite rewires their brains and completely changes their behavior. While rodents normally have a strong aversion to cat urine, a rat infected with toxo actually becomes obsessed with it. They are drawn to it like a moth to a flame, a teenager to a cell phone, or a middle-aged person to a fallacy-laden Facebook post. It’s like if I ate a sandwich that made me desperately want to braid a grizzly bear’s fur. Rodents carrying toxo feverishly seek out cat urine, which of course leads them to cats, who then eat them. The rodents are devoured, and their corpses carry the parasite directly into the cat’s stomach, where it can settle down and carve out a successful life and raise a family. Its offspring eventually set out on their own adventure, leaving for the litter box, which is why doctors always warn pregnant women not to clean the litter box, because doing so is a great way to come down with a toxoplasmosis infection. 

The Stanford paper argues that the link between toxoplasmosis and soccer championships is “compelling.” In the 2006 World Cup, seven of the eight winners could have been predicted by higher toxo rates in their countries. The only match in which the winner did not have the higher national infection rate was Brazil versus Ghana, and that appears to be because BOTH countries had incredibly high rates of infection.

“Rank the top 25 FIFA team countries by toxo rate and you get, in order from the top: Brazil (67 percent), Argentina (52 percent), France (45 percent), Spain (44 percent) and Germany (43 percent),” wrote the paper’s author, Patrick House, a few years ago. “Collectively, these are the teams responsible for eight of the last 10 World Cup overall winners. Spain, the only one of the group never to have won a cup, is no subpar outlier-the Spaniards have the most World Cup victories of any perpetual runner-up.”

How could this possibly be true, you ask? Well, scientific research has shown that toxoplasmosis infection increases testosterone production in male brains, which scientists strongly suspect exist, making them more likely to get into car accidents and more likely to be dogmatic and dismissive of authority. Research also shows, according to House, that it makes them more attractive to females. I think we can all file this in the “Life Is Unfair” folder.  

While professional soccer organizations, much like their counterparts in other major sports, ban the ingestion of testosterone supplements, they do not ban toxoplasmosis, which people ingest completely by accident. In other words, people who frequently clean cat litter boxes – or who simply live in countries where there are a lot of cats - might be accidentally taking what is essentially a performance enhancing drug.

Despite the possibility of becoming a great soccer player, I think it’s probably a good idea to warn against eating cat poop. You wouldn’t think I would need to add this warning, but you wouldn’t think you would have to put warnings on Tide Pods, either. I’ve seen the way people drive, the way they vote, and the things they say on Twitter, so advising people to be careful around manure is probably a good idea. 

It should be noted that while this particular parasite makes rodents go on a doomed quest for cat urine, and it can make humans either go blind or win a World Cup (what a strange world we live in), it has virtually no effect on the health of cats. Almost certainly protected from any ailments by their overwhelming disdain for all other species, they simply go on about their lives, happy and healthy despite the presence of toxo in their bellies. I once had a cat that was run over by a car. We took him to the vet, who examined him and said he seemed fine, but took some X-Rays just to be sure, and so that she could get some nice, deep flesh wounds on her arm that day, and we could pay for the whole ordeal. The images showed that his pelvis was completely broken in two places. 

“What should we do?” we asked. “Will he need to be put down?”

“No, he’ll probably be fine,” she answered. “Just keep an eye on him for a bit.” 

This was five years ago, and the creature is even more robust now than he was before he got mashed into the pavement. 

Cats have always held a certain enigmatic allure. If either of our dogs jumped onto the table and started licking the butter, we would probably deem them to be “bad” dogs. When our cat does it, we just nervously wait for him to finish, like a couple impalas surprised to find a lion drinking next to them at a watering hole. 

In fact, we tend to blame ourselves. 

“Well,” I say afterward. “It was our fault for keeping the butter lower than 30 feet from the ground. We were just asking for him to eat it, really.”

No matter how much we try to fight this truth, the fact is that human beings are profoundly unimportant creatures. The earth was here long before us, and it will be here long after we are gone. Our individual generations are too short to have any inherent meaning. Cats are obviously aware of this, and perhaps it is this knowledge that makes them so attractive to us. We know that they know how unimportant we are, which is soothing in a world that tries desperately to convince us that the opposite is true. You can only buy into the virulent political and social outrage of the world today if you think you are important. Realizing you are not, usually in the presence of a cat, serves as a nice balm. 

Most people know that Ancient Egyptians – and I feel the need to point out that their empire survived for 30 centuries, which is about 28 centuries longer than our current empire – had a thing for cats. What’s less well known is that in 1860, an odd little human named Louis William Wain was born in England. Throughout his life, he was best known for his drawings of massive-eyed, anthropomorphic cats. 

He, like most great artists, was eventually confined to a mental institution. 

It was later thought that you could actually witness the proliferation of his mental illness within his incredible drawings. (It got better and better, because mental illness is like steroids for creativity, or like toxoplasma for soccer.) While he remained technically gifted throughout his life, the cats he drew looked more and more bizarre, and in some ways, increasingly beautiful. 

It’s unclear if it was merely his development as an artist, or a glimpse into his own profound perception of the world around him. Some people have wondered if Vincent Van Gogh, for example, suffered from xanthopsia, a yellowing of the eye that causes the world to look different and might explain his obsession with sunflowers. 

There is another possible cause for the strange, wonderful cats created by Louis William Wain while he sat in the pauper’s asylum where he lived out his later years. I was not even remotely surprised when I read that that reason might have been: toxoplasmosis. 

Who knows if it is true, but just imagine if it is! A dangerous parasite sneaks into rodents and causes them to lose their minds, and in their confusion,  they seek out cat urine. They are eaten by cats, in whose stomachs the parasite reproduces. When the cats’ waste comes in contact with a human, he accidentally ingests these little troublemakers. The World Cup wouldn’t be invented until the final years of the man’s life, so instead of becoming the next Ronaldo, he becomes an artist, spending his life obsessively drawing cats, drawing the very creatures responsible for his condition in the first place, despite the fact that he does not know this.

It all makes me think of art. And of songs and of poems and of novels and sketches. Of the way we draw the things that make us who we are, and how we tell their stories. Of how those stories tell us things we need to know, about them, and about ourselves, and on, and on, in a strange, adventurous circle, not so very different than the life cycle of toxoplasmosis. We paint our grandparents and write newspaper columns about our children. We tell our stories. We cannot change our lot in life, but we have almost total control over the stories we tell about ourselves and those who make us.