TO FEED or not to feed that is the question creating one almighty row in a street near us in Athens. It all started innocently enough a young British expat her heart touched by the skeletal kittens raiding the silver garbage bins decided to start putting out saucers of milk. The milk became plates of food, then, aided by foreign friends and younger Greeks, store bought cat food.
Word got out about the soup kitchen, and more and more cats sat and waited each day mewing under the trees beneath her window until she arrived home, until the Greek family on the first floor had had enough and started shouting at her to stop it.
She determinedly continued, horrified at their callousness, their lack of love for the poor strays. A few days later her saucers were broken and the food thrown away. Now there is war.
The problem is for many Greeks raised in the countryside cats are kept hungry to keep their hunting instincts alive so they reduce the vermin: especially rats and snakes. They find the British obsession with pampered overindulged pussycats perplexing. You see very few adverts on Greek TV for expensive tins of meaty morsels: cats are there to work for their supper. They argue that by feeding the animals they lose their ability to forage, they are, after all, street animals born to live in the wild.
Many of the well-meaning cat charities in Greece not only feed and care for the stray cats but have a programme to spay and neuter them. Even this angers my Greek neighbours who consider it cruel and unnatural and I remember the huge tom cat that lived on the farm next to us in Devon. One of the best ‘ratters’ in the county his proud owners told us, who had bravely taken on foxes when they came to raid the chicken coop and left him with half a tail. He would refuse the farmhouse comforts preferring the barn with his harem and, they said to neuter him would destroy the natural aggression which was part of his personality.
So, we are foolish to imagine that by choice even domestic animals might not rather live in colonies of their own, which is why I find myself less inclined to criticise the Greek attitude to cats than many of my compatriots.
In a country with not so distant memories of famine and starvation, in a country where even in our semi- rural garden there are snakes and scorpions and fat brown rats, I welcome the stray cats but I respect their independence and keep my distance. Not just because they carry diseases from scabies to bartonellosis, ‘cat scratch disease’, but because I realise that just as I hate to see birds in cages, not all cats need to live in individual human homes, maybe, some can be just as happy with the scavenging freedom of the open road…
