We have to admit, the impulse to protect your pet is relatable! Check out this recent post from Atlas Obscura to learn how some US residents responded to the 1918 Flu Epidemic.

One image, dating from the years when Spanish flu rampaged across the United States, shows a unknown family of six, in Dublin, California, all wearing the standard mask of the time: “white and fastened around the head,” as Catharine Arnold writes in Pandemic 1918: Eyewitness Accounts from the Greatest Medical Holocaust in Modern History. A behatted woman holds a bouquet of flowers. And the family patriarch holds a tense-looking masked cat under his arm, like a loaf of bread. Faint wrinkles under the cat’s right ear show where the gauze is bunching up, and a faint shadow marks the spot of its triangular nose.

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