For decades, a parasite called Toxoplasma gondii has occupied an outsized place in the popular imagination — cast as a feline-borne mind-controller quietly steering human behavior from within. New research invites us to step back from that dramatic framing, finding that the actual risks posed by household cats are far more modest than the narrative suggests, and that the gap between what the science shows and what the culture absorbed tells us something important about how stories harden into facts.