Oh dear I think we must have had summer. It’s definitely a
lot cooler and wetter. So much so that the hosepipe ban might be lifted soon.
So people will go back to their old water-wasting ways.
We’re watching Springwatch again tonight and one of the
topics they are chatting about is to do with cats and their propensity for
catching ad despatching feathered critters. Funny how they don’t seem to mind
about them catching small mammals.
A suggestion was to give the cats a curfew and keep them in overnight,
as they are in some towns in Australia. It reminded us both of keeping cats in
PNG. Several of our friends had pet cats and there is no way that they would
let them outside. Well they could go outside in a fashion. The cats had a large
almost room sized cage outside accessed from within the house by a caged in
tunnel. This set up was more to protect the cat than the wildlife.
Behind our unit was a compound where a lot of the National
hotel staff lived. We used to see lots of cats and quite a lot of kittens, who
we thought must have found good homes because the feline population never
seemed to get out of hand. How wrong could I have been?
One afternoon when I was having a quiet afternoon in with a
good book I heard an awful screeching noise coming from the compound. I just
had to put my book down to investigate. I was horrified to see a woman in the compound
holding a cat by the scruff of its neck. She had the cat in one hand and was hitting
it over the head with what looked like and axe with the other. Moggy was
obviously destined for the pot. Oh dear it made me feel quite ill to think
about the fate of the poor cat.
But then I had to
take a step back and think about the whole picture. I might not have approved
of what she was doing but she was obviously feeding her family as any good mum
would do. Low local wages meant that
food was quite expensive and in the end it was not much different to us rearing
animals for our own consumption.
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