El Andalous - Cats

My December Visitory

A peculiarity (at least to me) of living in Egypt is the preponderance of wild cats and dogs that roam about the streets, restaurants, and cafes. It’s quite a topic of discussion over here.

We have a few wild cats in El Andalous, but they look fairly well fed and almost as if they are descended from domesticated cats. I had one visit me twice this week.

The first time, it was yowling outside my balcony. I stood up to find out what was making the noise and the cat looked up at me. I invited it onto my balcony and to my surprise, it ran across, jumped over my wall and joined me. What was more astonishing was that it seemed to be wanting someone to stroke it rather than desiring food.

I’ve never seen a cat look so happy to be stroked. He purred and slanted his eyes in happiness, nudged me to continue, turned his head if he wanted to be scratched behind his ear or on his neck. Every time I stopped, he started to yowl again. Every time I went into the kitchen to get something to drink, he would yowl outside. When I sat down, he sat on top of my computer or tried to nudge himself to sit right beside or behind me. It was very cute. He was actually still a kitten because his paws were still quite large, but it wasn’t a tiny kitten. I’d say it was an adolescent.

I was tempted to feed it, but since I’m going on holiday soon and I don’t stay here all year round, I didn’t want him to become dependent on me. Also, it would be a good idea for him to kill some of the rodents that must still be around rather than eating canned food. He stayed the entire day right up until it got dark, much to my surprise.

He visited again two days later, but I haven’t seen him since (I have heard the yowl, though!), and he didn’t stay so long on the second visit.

If you get too many cats around in any one place, of course, they can be a nuisance and there are many horror stories going around in Hurghada about people leaving poison out to kill them off (and then people’s domestic cats also get killed).

Joke told me that one café was being troubled by too many cats, so she advised them, ironically, to keep a cat family there who would regard the café as their territory. The cats would then make sure that other cats would not come. They did this, Joke comes in to feed the cats, and the cats in turn are indeed protecting their territory and the café is no longer overrun with them.

There’s a charity – I think it’s called Blue Moon – that will neuter cats and dogs in order to help keep the problem in check. A daughter of one of the owners over here, who is a vet, came over to do some voluntary work for them. She said the government had even offered a financial incentive for each cat or dog brought in to be neutered, only most people can’t afford the taxi ride to get it to the vet.

And there are a fair number of cat lovers over here. There’s a café called the Purrfect Cuppa which houses loads of cats that just roam the place. The tables are armed with water bottles so you can squirt the cats with water if you don’t want them near you. I’ve never been there myself but several people say it’s a great place to go (if you like cats, I guess!). I can’t imagine that taking off in Europe, though!