Misogyny did and still drives the witches nonsense. Poverty and fear prompt the steak minded to blame scapegoats.

Religion was the cause of both. The Egyptians worshipped cats in form of a deity called Bastet she was a cat godess half cat half woman. During the English civil war in the 1620s the puritans under Cromwell appointed a Witch finder general who sought out and burned unfortunate women who were branded witches and their cats , known as familiars, suffered the same fate.

You betcha

You are rather comparing apples and oranges here. The people of Egypt didn't populate England so you cannot compare the two cultures over time. A more apt comparison would be the view of snakes in England.
In Celtic culture snakes were seen as symbols of life, death, and rebirth - the famous Ouroboros symbol is a representation of this. While snakes were not worshiped they were revered in England until the Romans came along and pretty much killed off the Celtic religious leaders leaving only a base understanding of the religion in the populace. This left room for the masses to convert to Christianity a couple centuries later when it came up from Rome, however there still was a balance between the native religion and Christianity for some time (this is why we have things like the Celtic cross, bunnies and flowers are related to Easter, and Yuletide is associated with Xmas). Then after a series of wars, plagues, and changes in the Vatican Priests began to preach against and push back against the inclusion of pagan beliefs in the populace, this certainly caught fire in the ruling class as a better way to control the population. Eventually, this led to all this pagan being seen as evil and in league with the Devil and the image of the snake in England was forever changed to that of evil rather than rebirth - and tons of "witches" were killed along the way as well.

Maybe pussy was getting to useful ?