Spanish Cats Only Have Seven Lives

Graham, well now he’s Graham, strolled into our lives when he breached the defences of our garden three or four months ago. Maybe it was before then, maybe after; one never remembers when these things happen exactly, because they only become interesting in the light of what happens after.

We’ve had a lot of cats since we came to Spain. One, Mary, came with me riding down in an MGB GT. She screamed all the way from Huntingdon to Dover but finally accepted there was no escape and watched France pass by with her paws on the dashboard. She died of heart failure. So far she’s our only cat that has lived out her natural span. Most of the rest have been slaughtered by cars or simply disappeared.

We’ve also had a lot of cats just walk into our garden. We have food out for our household cats, and the interlopers recognise a free buffet when they see one. Several of them have been clever enough to work out the cat flap in double-quick time. One, Isabel, who we’d decided to take in, then went and gave birth to three kittens in our garden. She, and one of her sons, are still with us. Federico, one of the kittens, now fully grown, is the only one we’ve ever known the actual birthdate for. All the rest have had a birthday allocated by our local vets, Cristina or Rocío.

So Graham, like so many others, kept coming back despite repeated ‘Ois’ and ‘Gerroutofit’. It just so happened that it was around the time that Maggie got involved as a volunteer with the cat feeding and sterilisation programme run by the local town hall. I think it’s true that town halls now all have a responsibility to control the wild cat populations. The normal procedure is to capture them, sterilise them, put them back where they came from, with a feeding programme. That way the colony slowly withers away. Of course it doesn’t quite work like that, because most of the councils don't put sufficient money or effort behind their projects.

Anyway, so Maggie was pretty genned up on this cat control thing, so she decided to set a trap to catch the intruding grey-and-white cat. He was too astute, though. He managed to retrieve the food from one without getting snared, and with a separate and different model he simply ignored the food in the trap and ate from his traditional takeaway in our kitchen. We decided the only way to capture him was to be nice to him. As soon as he trusted us and didn’t bolt at the least movement from us, we’d scoop him up, whap him off to the vet and cut off his balls. It finally happened late this week.

Somewhere along the way he'd stopped being "that grey-and-white cat" and had become Graham. I can't remember exactly when that happened. Perhaps it was because he'd started hanging around so much, perhaps because he'd begun to trust us. Whatever the reason, once you've given a cat a name you've more or less admitted defeat. By then, whether we'd intended it or not, he'd already become one of ours.

As I was waiting with the mewling cat in a carrier I bumped into the main man who organises the town hall’s scheme for control of the cat colonies. He recognised the cat. He thought it had already been sterilised. So, our plan to get the municipality to pay for the sterilisation of the cat, which we would adopt if necessary, foundered. The vet has some scheme, though, for carrying out all the basic checks to make a cat legal under the most recent legislation. That includes microchipping, a pet passport, anti-this-and-that vaccinations and the sterilisation. The price is 100€. I didn’t read the small print, though, and it actually cost 165€ including everything. Money well spent, I thought. I’m a bit soft about the idea that some creature that was, figuratively, born in a back alley ends up living out their life well fed and cared for with veterinary attention when necessary.

I went to pick him up after the operation. “Everything OK?” I asked.

“Indeed,” said Rocío. “We’ve given him his jabs and deparasitisation tablets, he’s been microchipped, and we’ll prepare his passport now.” She paused. “Oh, but he does have the cat equivalent of HIV: he’s got FIV.” I had no idea what that meant. I knew about human immunodeficiency virus, of course, but I had no idea how the equivalent disease applied to cats. Would we need to kill him? What about our other cats – were they safe? 

Rocío half laughed. “As long as he doesn’t go for the other cats and tear lumps out of them so there’s blood all over the place, the chances of passing it on are very low. It’s mainly spread through deep bite wounds rather than cats simply living together. Sharing food bowls isn’t generally considered a problem. And if they’ve all been rubbing noses and eating together for months without any trouble, that’s reassuring.” For every precaution she suggested, I countered with something from the “herding cats” school of thought. Anyone who thinks cats will use individual food bowls or do as they’re told has never actually lived with cats.

“He’ll be fine,” Rocío said. “If he’s given decent food and lives in decent conditions, he’ll be good for years—and so will the others.” It wasn’t the best news I’d heard that day, but it wasn’t nearly as bad as I’d first feared. Halfway through the conversation, oddly, I remembered Princess Di hugging people with HIV.

Graham seemed very happy to be back in our house. All of a sudden he’s become very vocal and very keen to be on my lap, walking across the computer keyboard, sprawled out on our chairs. I suppose it was having his nuts cut off that did it.