At a cat sanctuary set in picturesque hills near Paphos, on the Mediterranean island of Cyprus, volunteers were grappling with a surge in abandonments they blamed on the COVID-19 pandemic.
“There has been an increase of about 30 percent of previously owned, loved [and] looked-after cats that have been left behind” as people depart the island, said Dawn Foote, 48, who runs the Tala Cats rescue center.
Some among Cyprus’ large expatriate and dual resident communities have retreated home as the economic squeeze has tightened, she said.
Photo: AFP
“People, at the moment, have just got no money, and it’s expensive to get a cat to another country — you’ve got passports to pay for, you’ve got transport carriers to pay,” Foote said.
“It’s heartbreaking,” she told reporters, saying that abandonments were rising island-wide, in part also due to locals no longer being able to afford pet food or vet bills.
Evidence of cats’ domestication in Cyprus dates back further than anywhere else, including Pharaonic Egypt.
In 2004, archeologists announced that they had unearthed the remains of a cat and a human deliberately buried together 9,500 years ago at the Neolithic village of Shillourokambos.
That is about 1,500 years earlier than the previous record find — also in Cyprus — in the form of a feline jawbone.
Abandoned cats just “don’t know how to survive,” Foote said. “A lot of them want to give up.”
The government imposed a nationwide lockdown from Jan. 10, Cyprus’ second since the pandemic began, after COVID-19 infections surged.
The closure of restaurants — choice locations for feline scavengers — has further compounded the misery for many of the island’s feline residents, whose numbers dwarf the human population, according to at least one animal welfare organization.
Meanwhile, the rehousing of animals, many of whom find their “forever homes” abroad, has become more difficult, a trend confirmed to reporters by a dog sanctuary near the capital, Nicosia.
Fewer cargo flights, higher transport costs and the repeated closure of sanctuaries to visitors are making it harder to win would-be owners’ hearts.
As a result, there are now about 800 cats prowling the grounds at Tala Cats, situated on land owned by the nearby Agios Neophytos Monastery.
The location is apt, because there is no breeding — all the felines that come through the gates are spayed or neutered.
Sterilization is key to keeping any stray cat population under control, and while some vets in Cyprus perform operations outside their main business, they face an uphill battle.
State coordination and funding for sterilization programs — 75,000 euros (US$90,596) in total last year, according to the Cypriot Ministry of Agriculture — were insufficient, vets told reporters.
The government strategy “is not working at all ... it’s not focused,” said Evis Andreou, 42, adding that key prerequisites, including censuses of stray populations in target areas, were absent.
The ministry said its neutering program has been “effective,” but added that it was “working to further improve our procedures, so that there is more effective targeting and control” during the coming year.
However, some say the public as a whole also fails to take the issue seriously enough.
“I hear people here say: ‘This is a stray I’ve been feeding for 10 years,’” veterinarian Marie-Ellen Josephides said.
“I’m like: ‘It’s not a stray, you’ve been feeding it ... it’s your outdoor cat’” — and it would have been breeding for much of the past decade, she said.
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