Strange Politics Over Cats

Garfield in a comic strip had it coming when he was threatened with an exile to Abu Dhabi.  The United Arab Emirates, indeed, is deemed as the world’s number one in terms of stray cat population as it is also the number one in people-to-car ratio.

Here is a place where using a slingshot is considered a crime and where one can take pleasure in the fact that culturally people don’t deliberately or heedlessly hurt animals for the mere fun of it. I’ve never seen a child here throw a stone at an alley cat, much less see a group of children hang a helpless kitten by the neck from a bridge like that nightmare I saw back home in my beloved country.

So the husband’s place of work, which isn’t a high rise but a villa with a lawn, has some alley cats taking shelter in its nooks and crannies.  And like any alley cat, well, first there was one…

Time came for the desert heat of summer that could go as high as 50 degrees centigrade. Newspapers gave notices for the provision of water in containers and to place these in balconies and lawns for birds and stray animals. So we bought plastic bowls to meet the request. Six of the bowls were brought to the husband’s office and strategically spread on the lawn. No one foresaw that those water bowls would become symbols of insubordination that could set back careers.

The water bowls were thrown during the husband’s absence.  Later he was told not to make the office a zoo by his senior who was based somewhere else. Another ranking employee was threatened with a home office recall if that bigwig ever saw a cat in the office’s lawn again.  Still the cats stayed.
Why the big deal over homeless cats that hide when there are strangers and never go inside the office nor use the computers?  I asked the husband. By this time, we have already brought home cats we deemed least likely to survive.

I did my bit of helping by calling Feline Friends, a visible and strong local organization at the forefront of saving and homing cats.  The answer was a counter request for the cats to be kept where they were in the meantime because they still had over a hundred cats that needed homes.

Any idiot could see that the presence of the cats became an issue of who was giving orders that must be followed or else, and was thus an issue of pride.  And idiot me wasn’t of any help to the besieged husband with my own declarations.  A zoo?  A zoo it isn’t if that guy isn’t there, I said.

When push came to shove and the husband’s blood pressure rose, he took to ending a radio interview with an appeal for takers of homeless cats. He did the same during meetings that he attended. A Filipino lady journalist picked up the story and wrote about it. Calls to the husband about the cats, some offering homes, others offering apologies and sympathies, started to come in.

One of the callers was a radio announcer, an Englishman, who wished to interview him.  In the thick of his work, he ended up giving my mobile phone number and volunteering me.

Please lead me on; I’m not used to this, I told the interviewer with the British accent while I, still in my sleeping clothes, held on to our living room curtains for dear life.  There was just something about the way he talked that took away some of my fright, like a stage director encouraging a performer to just step into the stage and give it his all.

I remember talking in rapid fire, from the history of the cats’ presence to what needs to be done.  Homes, they need homes, I answered the last question.  I know we cannot compel everyone to love cats, but I’m afraid those who hate cats must be missing something.  There ended my own Andy Warholesque 15 minutes of fame.

The husband called soon after, sounding like he had won the lotto.  He had received more calls of adoption offers for the cats.

Happy is the animal who is not tormented but instead treated with loving care and equal respect as a creation, just like us, of something greater than we may ever come to understand.  I thank whoever said this line for showing that one can be happy just by caring for animals.  So who cares about arrogant bigwigs who look like scalded cats?

(2 March 2008)