As countries around the world took extraordinary measures to curb the spread of COVID-19 in 2020, health officials in the U.K. reportedly considered culling the country’s cat population. According to the country’s former health minister Lord Bethell, there was an idea at one moment when they considered asking the public to exterminate all the cats in Britain.

"There was an idea at one moment that we may have to ask the public to exterminate all the cats in Britain."

Former Health Minister Lord Bethell discusses the early government response to the Covid pandemic. pic.twitter.com/YWyp32zPML

— Channel 4 News (@Channel4News) March 1, 2023

These comments come just one day after a massive leak of internal conversations between the former health minister’s boss, Matt Hancock, and senior U.K. figures. Last week, more than 100,000 of their WhatsApp messages from the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic were passed over to British media. The former health secretary called the leak a “massive betrayal breach of trust,” as reported by the Associated Press.

The U.K. has approximately 11 million cats, and many owners took to social media after the news saying they wouldn’t have given them up anyway. At the pandemic‘s onset, it was unclear how dangerous animals with COVID-19 actually were. While animal-to-human transmission is a real thing, the CDC has said animals do not appear to play a significant role in spreading the virus.

That did not stop countries like Denmark from mass culling 17 million minks and places like Hong Kong from killing some 2,000 hamsters last year as part of its zero-COVID policy.