Cat Shadows

Ruwais is a town with many feral cats. You hear them yowling all of the time, you see them tipping over trash cans and, I've suspected, one ripped a hole in our screen door. Don't get me wrong, I like cats better than dogs for the most part, but they're everywhere. 

Our villa came without the general maintenance usually done before a new family moves in. It's an old house, built sometime in the 80's, and has had many families before ours. Because of this we are used to issues with the water, paint peeling off of the walls and a very difficult to manage screen and door to the back patio.

When a gash appeared in the bottom corner of the screen we knew we'd have to be careful when it was in place or the cats would waltz right in the house in search of food. (Yes, they do.) Then, the difficult-to-manage door quit functioning: it would close almost all the way, but left a 3-4 inch gap. So we closed it and the screen as much as possible when getting the downstairs ready for the night.

This particular night, Ben went to bed early because he wasn't feeling well, and as soon as he and the kids were fast asleep I looked out the bedroom door and a shadow slinked from the stairs towards the rooms... A cat! I screamed at it and it zipped back downstairs and squeezed out the door before I could get down there. I put a cookie sheet between the screen and the door to block the hole, shut the downstairs doors and hoped that would block the crazy creatures.

Maintenance takes a while to get around to anything, so for now a baby gate between the screen and the door closes the hole and all the downstairs doors closed contains it.

In Guatemala the constant dogs and firecrackers were sleep hazards and here, it's the cats! Hopefully, now, they'll stay outside sleep hazards.

Seen in Abu Dhabi 31: Rescue Animals

 

Above: It was a rescued animal type of day: We saw the gas station attendants had rescued this bird from their parking lot and friends had found the kitten looking for food in the trash. The kitten was blinded from eye infection, had worms, fleas and a tail injury. It later died in the rescuer's arms.

There is a problem with an abundance of cats in Ruwais. Though it is supposedly illegal to feed or house them as pets, it still happens. Trash is removed twice a day by city maintenance, partly as a cautionary measure against feeding them or other pests, but they hunt through the trash cans at night and some leave food out for them. This leaves a lot of kittens wandering the streets throughout the year and the ones who make it to adulthood wandering everywhere and entering any house with the door left cracked open in search of food. 

There is no shelter or vet in Ruwais. The nearest is in Abu Dhabi a good 2.5-3 hour drive away. If anyone felt like starting an animal program out here, it would fulfill a desperate need.

Pet Moths

Talia keeps wishing for a pet, especially a horse, but since that's not possible right now, she's been befriending every moth that she sees in the house. 
One day, she had one sitting on her hand and she was talking about how beautiful it was... and then it flew into the bug zapper (because there are so many mosquitoes lately) and she cried: "I loved it and it had died like Uncle L!" I'm not sure how much of that was drama and how much of it was real. Ben tried to be sympathetic, but he couldn't help laughing at the same time just because of the sheer amount of drama in her voice.

For now, we just share our friend's pets. Cats are super abundant and wild here, there is always 4 or 5 sitting outside around our garden, on the walls, in the trash cans or around the gates. They're constantly caterwauling at night making all sorts of interesting music. They're also always reproducing, so the most popular pet seems to be the kittens. (That might be because the dogs are likely to get eaten. Seriously.)

Some people have fish, the fashionable Emirati's have things like lions, tigers and cheetahs, and there are things like foxes at the animal markets (a place many people find cruel and are trying to change.) 

A pet that surprised me were the parrots caught wild here who were eating the sunflower seeds from a friend's sunflowers. Her husband is a capable trapper and was able to catch them. I've never seen wild parrots here, (though I thought there was one in the neighbor's mango tree.) The kids were excited to see the birds here, but I'm not so sure the birds were excited to see them.

I'm not sure that we'll ever get a pet here, since we don't have long term plans to stay and it doesn't make sense if we are just going to leave. It's also difficult to know what to do with one if we have to go to the city or travel home on vacation... but one day, maybe, we will settle in a place where a pet can thrive and who knows? Maybe Talia will get a horse some day.







Then again, we did wake up to this in our garden yesterday morning... maybe we can just have wild, outside pets for now.