Cats

Ateneo sign: no cats because of student safety?

          One of the things we had to adjust to in our time here was the attitude towards cats. We see cats and kittens all over the place. Here, they are mostly scavengers who dig through peoples’ trash at night, or eat up leftover scraps from meals. There are people who have cats for pets, but this is not the norm. Instead, most people don’t want to touch cats (I imagine many have fleas) or want to encourage their presence (the trash cans outside our apartment are often knocked over and torn apart by cats in the night). It’s often quite difficult for us to accept this, especially when we see incredibly tiny kittens we know won’t make it very long or when we hear stories about people throwing litters of kittens in the garbage. We’ve collected some photos of cats in our neighborhood over the past few months that we’ll post here. We mostly left out the photos of all the cats we see missing eyes and ears, or with injured legs and bald patches (although you can see some of that in this blog post about stray cats and dogs in Manila).

Cat on Roof

            Grace and I have a game where we try to see who can spot a cat on a roof first. This happens frequently but I’ve only managed to catch a few photos when they’re snoozing away. Normally they’re on the move and hard to catch. 

blurry black and white cat in center of photo

two here: double points

white cat snoozing in the late afternoon. It's here many days

look for the cat lying down in the middle of the photo on the little piece of green roof

            One of the reasons we see so many cats is that we walk past the house of a woman who has adopted lots of them. They mostly hang out in the enclosed area between the front of her house and her front gate. We met her on Christmas day when she started speaking to us in French (she thought we were from France). Turns out, she’s a retired Ateneo professor and is probably one of the most educated people in our neighborhood. She’s been to Madison, WI and lots of other places for academic reasons. Since her retirement, she’s been taking care of the cats in our neighborhood. They actually follow her around when she walks away from her home.

She has adopted lots of tiny kittens that otherwise wouldn’t last long. For example, a few months ago, there were two newborn kittens hanging out in Ateneo, one white and one black. The white one found its way down the stairs to Barangka, where she took care of it. We stopped seeing the black one months ago. Another example, during a rare summer downpour a few weeks ago, one of our American friends heard quiet meowing coming from inside a drain spout and saw a handful of kittens about to be drowned by all the rain. She was able to reach in and grab two of them. An older cat in the professor’s house adopted them. 

leaving her house, cats following

the little white one in the bottom center was rescued from Ateneo's campus and has doubled in size

one of the cats saved from the drainpipe, scared of my camera

she adopted this orange kitten a few months ago

it' s much bigger now 

We mentioned this briefly in our last post, but some of our American friends here suddenly found 6 kittens on their back porch. A pregnant cat must have found its way into their fenced-off, quiet back porch and decided it was a good place to give birth. These girls now have been feeding the kittens and trying to find homes for them. Again, here's a brief video we took upon first meeting them (they were just waking up). 

Last one: a week ago, we were walking through the alleys between Ateneo and our apartment and saw three newborn kittens lying in front of someone’s door. These were definitely the smallest cats I’d ever seen. We looked for them in subsequent days but didn’t see them until one day we realized that they had been taken to the retired professor’s home. One of the cats there now feeds them.

first sighting

transplanted to a new home with a new mother

and other mothers...

lots of kittens here of different sizes