Herding cats

We share our house with four cats. Three of them started as squatters.

Our current four are the latest in a long line. Mary emigrated from the UK with us. Eduardo was our first Spanish cat. His mum wandered into a friend's house to give birth. Beatriz and Teodoro we got from a woman who rescues mistreated and abandoned animals. We got another kitten from her later, Samuel, but I killed him when reversing the car in our yard. The rest have been squatters, okupas. Some have style and manners and settle inside the house - they are given proper names and taken to the vet for jabs and potions and inspections. The ones that never get further than stealing food from us are identified by other sorts of names - Bad Cat, Mr Big Balls, Hissy Missy, Mr Stripy Pants etc.

Britons often say that Spaniards are cruel to animals. I suspect that's as true as saying that cars are red. Some are. I've seen figures from the RSPCA that suggest Britons are no strangers to animal cruelty either. It seems to me that most Spanish people who have animals, as pets, behave in much the same way as their British counterparts. The people who use animals as the means to an end, sheepdogs, hunting dogs, farm animals etc. see that utilitarian side first and are often complacent about the state of the animals. That laxness is, possibly, more marked in Spaniards.

Although some Spaniards keep cats as pets the majority of Spanish people don't see them as house pets. They may feed cats on their property but generally there's a Spanish belief that cats can take care of themselves and only need minimal help from humans. 

There is also a widespread opinion that sterilising or castrating a cat is on the wrong side of civilised. Newish legislation doesn't agree. It says that all pet cats, well those that can mix with other cats, have to be sterilized before they reach six months old. Obviously there are exceptions but the general idea is to avoid herds of cats scrounging from bins, taking up space in the animal shelters and messing up the bodywork of passing cars. There are, supposedly, initiatives to sterilise the cat colonies in cemeteries, around the bins etc. but lack of funding seems to be the hallmark of such schemes.

The whole of this legislation is posited on the responsible care of pets. It involves control of the actions of an animal's keeper - microchips to identify keepers and animals, passports to demonstrate that the animals have received certain treatments and medication etc. The legislation came into force in September 2023. Like so many laws that are introduced to great fanfare, there were as many detractors as supporters. The shortcomings of the rules, the difficulties of policing the law and the like were the stuff of hundreds of articles, news reports and bar room conversations. The exclusion of hunting dogs smelled of vested interest. I suppose it's like so much legislation that has gone before it. The rules about wearing crash helmets were flouted for years. The procedures to counter dodgy black money were seen as basically flawed. Nowadays it's difficult to spend wodges of cash and nearly everyone on a bike has a helmet. The legislation is slowly but surely implemented, amended and policed. People forget that it was ever controversial or innovative.

So our cats are legal. They have names that are bilingual, after a fashion - Federico, Fred, Teodoro, Teo and Isabel, Issy. The last cat to cross our threshold, and settle on our sofa, Jesse, is the exception. It's all to do with Postman Pat having a black and white cat. When I first took him to the vet I suggested the name Yésica, the Spanish version of Jessica, as his official passport name. Rocio, the vet, laughed and suggested it may do him psychological harm. So Jesse, as in Jesse James, it is.

Teo, as mentioned above, came from a local charity. Issy just insinuated her way in somehow and then gave birth in our garden. Fred was one of Issy's kittens. Jesse just turned up and refused to go away. The cats, however they got here, are a constant presence in the house. We have sofas and tables protected from their claws, their secretions and their their dusty bodies. We have cat furniture clogging up our house and it's not unusual to find a couple of them shoulder charging the bedroom door at daybreak if they consider that we are a bit tardy with their morning feed.

Jesse hasn't been too well lately. He has a urinary tract problem. The first time it was sorted out by rummaging around in his urethra, the second time he required an operation to remove a stone in his bladder. The operation was relatively expensive, the veterinary diet he's on now will be more expensive. As the four cats are confirmed food browsers we could think of no way to feed them all other than to allow them all access to the same food.

Maybe we should have taken out that anti squatter insurance.

It's not Pat's

We've had a cat hanging around our garden for a while now. At first it was nasty to our own cats so we chased it off but, of course, with time it wore us down (more me than Maggie - Maggie's tough). To begin with we gave the cat occasional bits and bats of food and then it became almost regular feeding. What our spoiled cats didn't eat we gave to the garden cat.

Next came the name. Our neighbours said they called it Jess. The cat was crossing the garden - "Ah, here comes Postman Pat's cat," I said, "Hello, Jess," said Maggie. "How did you know that?" I asked. Postman Pat? Black and white cat? I didn't know. Impoverished upbringing you know. Or maybe I'm just too old.

She's a strokeable cat. There's always the possibility that she might turn and bite or scratch but usually she purrs. We're all a bit wary though. Especially our cats.

Jess has been hobbling for the past couple of days. I went to the vet and asked how much to strap up a broken leg. Around 50€ with the X-ray said the receptionist. The cat was surprisingly easy to catch, surprisingly docile inside the cage and well behaved on the journey in to town. Pets need a name at the vet's for their database. She's called Yésica I said. The bilingual version.

The vet suspected an abscess from the start; wild cats and fighting and such. There was pus everywhere. Knockout drops, antibiotic injection, anti flea and tick treatment and my credit card lighter by 68€. I left her in our living room in a cat basket to sleep off the anaesthetic but now she's back in the garden and walking much better.

Cats

We've just had a few days in Tangier. I'm sure that, in my youth, when Simon Templar went there, we used to say Tangiers. Anyway whatever it's called the city we went to is the one in Morocco, just opposite the southernmost tip of Spain at Tarifa. Between 1923 and 1945, it was a city jointly administered by Britain, France and Spain as an International City. I'd had a vague hankering to go there since I read a Spanish novel which was set in Tanger (Spanish name). So, when I saw a flight from Valencia for 12.99€ one way (even after all the usual Ryanair tricks and ruses it still only cost 40€ there and back) it was a done deal.

One of the several things we noted wandering around Tangiers were the cats. There were hundreds of them. Some were skinny, some were clearly unwell, some looked like cared for pets. Whatever their status they were left to their own devices. It's not the same in Spain. Spanish street cats stay well away from people whom they don't trust at all. As a general rule Spaniards do not approve of castrating or sterilising cats. They see it as something cruel and unusual. The Town Halls have vague sterilisation schemes, supported with paltry amounts of money, but the main forms of cat control are disease and motor cars. This means that there are plenty of wild cats in Spain generally to be seen at dusk skulking around the communal big bins in the street. I wouldn't like to give the impression that cats are not kept as pets in Spain but they have nothing like the same status as dogs. If a family does have a cat it's often a sort of half pet, half domesticated, fed from time to time, if there is anything left over, but generally expected to fend for itself, pet. There are pampered cats too but there is nothing like the same division into cat people and dog people here that there is in the UK for instance.

We've got a couple of house cats that we've had for a while: Beatriz and Teodoro. We've had other cats before only one of which has survived to old age. These two we got from a woman, called Irene, who runs a cat shelter and re-homing scheme called Gatets sense llar, which translates, from Valenciano, to something like Homeless Kittens. Bea and Teo came to us at a very young age so our house is their home. They have their territory centred on the house and they don't stray very far which, as we're surrounded by open country, is nice and safe.

We're not far from a farm and, in time honoured tradition, the farm has cats. Farm cats are not coddled; they have to be self sufficient. They are constantly flea, tick and worm infested and, of course, hungry. We put out food for our two and so we become an easy source of gourmet dining for the farm cats. They invade our garden. We chase them off. We're not very good at it. We're a soft touch especially with the cats that are a bit more approachable or trusting than others. It's happened too many times now that a cat begins to trust us and we take a liking to it. We start with scraps and left overs and then work up to feeding it on a regular basis. After a while we abuse its trust, give it a name and, when it's not looking, take it to the vet for de-paratisation and a quick sterilisation. On one occasion we did that for a cat, Gertrudis, only to find that she hadn't trusted us enough to introduce us to her two hidden kittens until they were well grown and in need of a solid meal.

The farm cats are a sub colony of another group that lives across in the village. This means, that unlike the cats that have grown up with us from kittens, these cats call a range of places home - our house, the bin by the farm and a couple of bins on the other side of the road that separates us from the main part of the village. There is also a woman in the village who is a softer touch than us and feeds dozens of cats. Taken all in this means that the cats are prone to pop across the road for a chin wag, for company, for sex and to see if there is anything tasty on the menu.  One day as they cross they don't make it and we never see them again. There are lots of other theories about how and why cats disappear, from being taken by owls to being poisoned, but I'm a big believer in the the motor car catslaughter theory.

So, recently, two small, basically white, cats have taken to calling. Our cats don't like them but the stand offs have been low key. We followed the well worn route of scraps to regular feeding. It became obvious that one was pregnant and we didn't send her packing. She ignored the prepared nests of cloth and paper and had the kittens by the fence, hidden by thick foliage, whilst we were away in Tangier.

"We'll have to adopt them," said Maggie as she busied herself with leaving for work this morning. I hope she doesn't mean all of them as in all of them. That would be five more which I don't see somehow. Best not to think about it for a while.

Lovely

Just a bunch of assorted trivia that has tickled my fancy in the last couple of days.

There are a lot of stars in Culebròn. That's probably an incorrect assertion. I suppose there are exactly the same number of stars as there are anywhere but lots of them are easy to see from Culebrón because we get lots of cloudless night skies and there's very little light pollution. That's not quite true either because, at the moment, we have a dazzling Christmas light display which, for the very first time this year, features a spiral of LED rope around the palm tree. The Geminids meteorite shower was flashing across the sky all last night though in an even more dazzling display. Lovely.

We went to the flicks yesterday evening, we often do. We'd been to visit someone and we were a little late away; we went the long way around so we arrived at the cinema a few minutes after the advertised start time. The cinema we often use shows the sort of pictures that don't always attract a lot of advertising. So, sometimes, if the start time is 6.15 the film actually starts at 6.15 but, then again, if it's a bit more Hollywood, the 6.15 film might not start till 6.30 after the trailers and ads. Whilst Maggie waited to buy the tickets I went to have a look at the monitors to see if the film had begun. If it had we had a second choice. The manager, who was on ticket collection, said hello, lots of the staff greet us by name nowadays, and asked me which film we wanted to see. I told him. It was due to start 10 minutes ago he said, but there's nobody in there so I'll start it when you're ready. A private showing and to our timetable. Lovely.

Bad keepers that we are we'd missed the annual update of the vaccinations for the house cats. I took them both in today. I was amazed - apart from the chief vet everyone that I saw in the vet's surgery/office is doing or has done at least a couple of English classes with me. Of course I shouldn't be driving but I thought the 5kms in to town wouldn't hurt. As I drove Bea home she had a bit of an accident, bowel wise. She's not a big fan of car travel. At the exact moment that the stench of her reaction assailed my nostrils the very obvious yellow van of the bloke who looks after my motor went the other way. He flashed his lights in greeting. I would have waved back but a bit of chrome trim chose that exact moment to fly off the front of the car and bounce off the windscreen. I went back to get it later, on the bike, and fastened it back on to the car with duct tape as a temporary repair. Lovely.

And finally, yesterday, we passed the bodega/almazara in Culebrón. There were a stack of cars and vans queuing to hand over their olive crops to be pressed into oil by the almazara, the oil mill. The bodega, the winery, did its stuff back around September time. So I strolled over with the camera to take some snaps. I have no idea what the process was but I liked the small scale nature of it. Little trailers full of olives, plastic bags full of olives, people standing around and chatting waiting to have their crops weighed in. The cars are obviously modern enough but the process is probably as old as the hills. Lovely.

Invasive manoeuvres

You will remember we had trouble with a white cat that invaded our garden. The cat was nice enough but it didn't get on with our two. They hid inside, afraid to wander the garden. We were glad when the white cat disappeared.

There are colonies of wild and semi wild cats in Culebrón. Some probably get occasional food from humans but others live off what they hunt or can scavenge from the big communal bins. A young female tabby realised that the open door to our kitchen, at times, offered access to free food left over by our satiated cats. She was a persistent little cat, despite the water pistol, despite the occasional hosepipe assault, despite the shouts and clapping hands, she kept coming back. Our cats had no real problem with her, an occasional hissing but nothing profound. We are softies. We gave her food, always away from our house, but we did feed her. An easy if unreliable and sometimes contradictory feeding station. She was also human friendly, happy to be stroked.

A couple of weeks ago we decided to take her in. She would have to go to the vet and be checked. If she had something infectious then she was on her own but so long as she was basically fit the sofa and TV awaited alongside three square a day. Uncannily the cat failed to appear mewing on our window sill on the days when I was free to take her to the vet. Until this morning.

"What's her name?," they asked at the reception desk. "I didn't choose this," I replied quickly, "Gertrudis". A couple of animal keepers in the waiting room agreed that it was a nice name. When Cristina, the vet, beckoned us in to the surgery she called the cat by name with a smile on her lips. "Basically fit as a fiddle, obviously she's got worms and fleas but she's a sturdy little cat - nice temperament too". I arranged an appointment for the sterilization next week, paid the very reasonable flu jab and deparastiation (is that a word) charge and we came back home.

So we now look after three tabby cats difficult to tell apart at a glance - Beatriz, Teodoro and Gertrudis.

Undressing and covering oneself in fake blood

I'm feeling a bit Sanjay Gandhi today - not because I've won a dodgy car building contract - but because I've been part of an enforced sterilization program. I didn't even offer a free portable radio.

Britons who live here are often very vocal in their complaints about how animals are treated in Spain. On a big scale the bullfights which kill horses and bulls in front of cheering crowds give them obvious ammunition. These sort of things no longer go unnoticed by lots of ordinary Spaniards either. Many Spanish people have no time for these hangovers from bear baiting times. Every time that the people of Tordesillas arm themselves with lances and sit astride their horses ready to cut down a bull they are harried by protestors. It's the same in Coria where the bull is peppered with little darts and then has his balls cut off. They no longer throw a live goat from the church tower in Manganeses de la Polvorosa to be caught in a fire fighter style blanket having bowed to public pressure. In Carpio del Tajo the they have not used live geese in their festival for over thirty years - nowadays the geese that they wrench the heads off, as they ride by on horses, are already well dead. Half naked protestors daubed with fake blood make it less comfortable for the bullfight crowds to get to their seats and so it goes on. Lots of the barbarism has been toned down but there are still plenty of spectacles which, at the very least, use the distress and suffering of animals as a form of supposed entertainment.

On a much smaller scale the expat rural Britons often have stories about puppies abandoned outside their homes, kittens thrown into rubbish bins and hunting dogs abandoned on the road when they are too old to keep up with the hares they are supposed to catch. Hunting, by your everyday Joe, is still very common in the countryside.Then of course there are, from time to time, stories in the British popular press about some donkey being terribly mistreated and most of us have a story about a horse, mule or dog tethered in the midday sun without shade or water.  On the other hand most Britons will add to that a story about other Britons who have abandoned dogs when they return to the UK as a reminder that Spaniards don't have the market cornered in mistreatment of animals.

Despite all of this apparent random cruelty there are lots of animal protection laws in Spain and they were recently beefed up which is probably why it's only in the recent past that people have started to be prosecuted. One of the reasons is that the perpetrators have made it impossible for the offence to be ignored. Post a video on YouTube or WhatsApp of setting fire to a cat and you can be pretty sure it will go viral. Shortly afterwards expect a house call from the Guardia. That was the case with a couple of twentyish year olds who had a whale of a time jumping on piglets and squashing and killing seventy of them in the process.

I remembered the piglet case from the news. There was another one about a bullfighter who had been mistreating a horse and as I Googled for the information I came across lots of newspaper articles along the line - "Guardia Civil shelves cruelty case", "Town Hall drops charges against man who arranged illegal dog fights" and so on. I wrote an article for the TIM magazine about catching song birds to eat and, there again, lots of the articles I read in my research talked about how the authorities turned a blind eye to illegal capture techniques. There is still an awful lot of acceptance of animal mistreatment in Spain though the idea that animals have no "rights" is far less prevalent than it once was.

Around here there are several animal rescue charities - lots are run by Britons. It's probably fair to say that dog rescue is the biggest area but I've been to both a horse and a primate rescue centre close by. Cats are often covered by the dog charities but Spanish thinking on cats is that, generally, they can take care of themselves. So whilst a loose dog will be hauled off to a charity for adoption or to the Town Hall dog pound nobody really takes much notice of the moggies unless they are being mistreated.

I may have mentioned that we took on a couple of cats recently. We got them from an association in Pinoso which is called Gatets sense llar del Pinós. The name is in the local Valencian language but it means something like Pinoso Kittens without a home.

Before we'd got the cats we had an occasional visitor to our garden, a big, mature, white, male cat. He was wary of us but semi approachable so we left out some dried cat food when we remembered. We hadn't seen him for a while but, as soon as we got the two rescue cats, he started to turn up regularly. There was a lot of screaming and bits of fur and cats refusing to come down from trees. The white cat even found a back way into the house so he could eat the food we'd left out for our two. We had a lot of fun with a hosepipe and I invested money in a water pistol. But Maggie had bigger plans. She borrowed a trap from Gatets; one can of Premium cat food and he was captured. And if you go back to the first sentence you will see who it was who got to take him to the vet where the castration was paid for by the local Town Hall via the Charity. I paid for the flea and parasite stuff though. He was obviously pretty sore and very wobbly as he came out of the carry box and made his way gingerly out of our garden.