Alley cats

There was a time when people read magazines printed on paper. One of them, Cosmopolitan, used to run light-hearted quizzes – Do you have what it takes to be a boss?, Are you a potential serial killer? – that kind of thing. One of the inevitable questions was whether you were a dog or a cat person. Our house is definitely cat, but for many Spanish households that question is about as useful as the outcome of those tests. Lots of Spaniards will tell you they have cats, but they don’t mean that in the same way as they do for dogs, or the same as we do. Our cats sleep on the sofa and they are steadily, and sometimes not so steadily, dismantling the house. Those half on, half off cats might get a name and a bowl of food left out, but little more. Current legislation says that option no longer exists; either people take responsibility for animals in their care or they will get into bother. But rules and reality are often two completely different things. I should add that some Spanish cats are not semi-adopted street cats but are mollycoddled flat dwellers with lifelong access to multichannel TV.  

Maggie has now signed up as a volunteer in a scheme organised by Pinoso Town Council to control the local feral cat colonies. These colonies exist everywhere in Spain, from cemeteries and parks to the rubbish bin on the corner of the street. They interbreed, there are kittens aplenty, and it’s only Malthusian dogma – disease, cars, starvation – that keeps them from taking over whole swathes of land. Meanwhile, the contest between those residents who feed them and those who’d happily see them exterminated has gone on for years.  

As I said, Maggie has volunteered. She even helped with translation between the Spanish-speaking organisers and a group of, potential volunteers from many countries who, hopefully, understood English. She explained the scheme: first comes a survey of colony numbers, then a feeding programme, followed by trapping the cats so they can be checked by vets, neutered, marked (with a small V-shaped notch in the ear), and returned to the colony. Their enforced infertility should, in time, bring numbers under control and when the whole thing seems to be in hand. 

When I asked Maggie for more detail she wasn’t entirely sure, so I went back to the proposal that the town council approved in May. Things move on, reports aren’t always timely, so don’t take what I say as gospel, Torah or Dharma.  

From what I can tell, the councillor responsible is María José Moya, with the town’s biologist, José Carlos Monzó (yes, Pinoso employs a biologist) as the day-to-day boss. As always I suspect the majority of the real work will be shouldered by an administrator, in this case Maria an environmental education officer. The programme tries to balance animal welfare, public health, and the often heated community debates around street cat colonies. The basic idea is the tried and tested trap-sterilise-health-check-release method. The target is to sterilise at least 75% of each colony to stabilise its size. Although both sexes are included in this scheme, the intention is to go for the lads first, even though a lot of the noise associated with colonies is made by females looking for a good time, and not just by toms fighting. It is the toms, though, that create the characteristic stink. The castration of a male cat is relatively cheap and easy, and one tom can do a lot of reproducing. 

Most of the cats will probably go through our local vet, Cristina, and her crew. The cats will be identified, registered, vaccinated and deparasitised. Those that are sick or injured will be treated. I suppose some cats will be so sick or so damaged that they will be killed – nicely, I’m sure, but killed nonetheless. The town hall isn’t going to behave like individual keepers and pour thousands of euros into a lost cause. Cats that prove tame enough, especially those needing longer care, may be passed to the protectorate and put up for adoption. The wilder ones will only be returned to colonies once sterilised and stabilised.  

Volunteers, like Maggie, will get ID, as it remains against the byelaws for unregistered people to feed wild cats. As well as feeding, they will monitor colonies and keep records of "their" cats. They must provide fresh water, maintain feeding schedules, and use only dry food at set times to prevent pests and waste. Feeding and shelter points have to be kept clean daily. Colonies in sensitive locations near schools, health centres, playgrounds and main roads will be moved to a new, more suitable, location. The volunteers will also help trap cats and take them to the vet. The plan even includes a system for removing rogue volunteers who don’t follow the rules.  

Funding is less clear. The local town hall appears to have applied to the Ministry of Social Rights, Consumer Affairs and Agenda 2030 to help finance feline colony control in Pinoso for a total of 27,000€, with 24,000€ of that being for sterilisation. I can’t find anything that says whether the grant application was approved but, as the work has started, it may well have been.  

The programme fits in with wider plans for public awareness campaigns, as well as the relatively recent (Sep 2023) animal welfare laws. These include pet microchipping, limits on the number of animals per household, sterilisation in the case of cats and a whole range of other common sense measures which will probably take years to bed in. When the new legislation was introduced there was a fair bit of publicity about it (which has now stopped) and it aroused the usual chorus of complaints. I remember that one of the tenets of the rules was that they protected animals with a backbone as a simple formula to cover everything from ferrets to horses. Very soon, though, social media rang with stories about the new rules protecting sewer rats. I’m sure people will be just as ready to complain about this, long overdue, local initiative to control the cats and improve their lot just a little.