Animals. I can’t write a blog about Cyprus without writing about this. It is the only thing about living here that I struggle with. Cyprus has a problem with stray cats and dogs. Not noticeably worse than many other countries I’ve travelled to, but with those countries I’m just on holiday. On holiday, I will eagerly share my dinner with the strays gathered around the restaurant table. I will donate money to an international animal charity. Then I will go back to the UK knowing I did what I could. All countries have animal welfare problems, the UK is no different. But in the UK, there are more structures in place to deal with it so that it is quite possible to live your life without ever seeing suffering animals. Over here, the problem is in your face. If I can get through a month – even a week – without hearing a sad animal story, I’m doing well.

This post is about the cat situation here. There is also a serious problem with dogs, but that’s the subject for another post. Why are there so many stray cats? This image sums it up well.

Unneutered stray females are often pregnant before they are fully grown. Female cats have an awful life nursing their young in extreme heat (when they need extra water) and falling pregnant almost immediately after the kittens have weaned. The cats and kittens are often seen with viruses and infections that can cause them to lose their eyes. I know of two cat sanctuaries – Malcolm’s Cat Sanctuary, which is currently full, and the Tala Cat Monastery, which has taken in 40 kittens in the last 3 weeks (often dumped in their car park), and are in desperate need of support.

As I see it, there needs to be more neutering programmes to prevent the endless litters of kittens. I’ve helped out with a neutering programme in my community and more cats are now neutered than not. How can you tell if a cat has been neutered? It usually has a small ‘v’ taken from its ear.

The Animal Party is a political party in Cyprus set up to address the issue of animal welfare and ensure animals are treated respectfully. They quote Gandhi who said that the greatness of a nation can be judged by how its animals are treated. They are trying to get a position created for a Commissioner of Animal Welfare to get the legal machinery moving in Cyprus to protect animals. I hope they are successful and put things in place at a national level.

So what can you do if you have a stray or kittens in your neighbour? Please, take responsibility for them and have them neutered – if not, your neighbourhood could be overrun. Kittens can be neutered once they weigh more than 2kg. A female mother-cat can be neutered as soon as kittens have been weaned. If you can, find homes for the kittens. Facebook is the perfect vehicle for doing this. If not, help them out and leave food and water down for them. They will repay you by deterring snakes and keeping the rodent population down. If you try to relocate them, more unneutered strays will just fill their place. Cats are territorial, keep the neutered ones and they should deter new ones from setting up camp. Many vets here are very supportive of neutering strays and will do it for huge discounts. A vet in Paphos neuters all strays for free. If you can’t catch your stray, contact one of the animal sanctuaries as they may be able to lend you a cat trap (it doesn’t hurt the cats). These sanctuaries will also be able to offer advice if you can’t care for the strays.

We arrived in Cyprus January 2015 and remained pretty ignorant about the situation for some months while the weather was cold. But there were clues. The three dead puppies I saw on the motorway near Limassol – I avoided that stretch of road for weeks afterwards. The dead cat and kitten on the hard shoulder beneath a bridge – I didn’t want to imagine what had happened to them. Then when the weather warmed up I began to notice Facebook posts about stray kittens needing homes. I scrolled past, assuming they’d be taken to a rescue centre if they couldn’t find homes. I mentioned this to a neighbour who said ‘Ah, it’s kitten season, there are loads of kittens around at the moment.’

Kitten season. Of everything I’d heard and seen in Cyprus, that term felt the most foreign. Weren’t kittens born all year round in comfortable homes, looked after by breeders? I was to discover that kittens can be born all year round, but stray kittens born in the colder months are unlikely to survive long enough for you to see them.

So we enjoyed our first few months of semi-blissful-ignorance. Until one evening a year ago last week. We’d just got back from a weekend in Kyrenia. I was Facebooking in bed and saw a desperate post from a woman who could hear the cries of three kittens in the bush at the back of her garden. The woman was heavily pregnant and worried about trying to catch them. She said the kitten’s mother had been killed by a neighbour’s dog that afternoon and that they were so tiny they wouldn’t survive the night on their own.

I hadn’t seen a post that was quite so urgent before, so I clicked on the comments thread to reassure myself that someone had gone to rescue them. Lots of people commented offering advice, saying they’d rescue them in the morning. I followed the thread for over two hours before finally admitting to myself that no one was going to save them that night and they could die if I didn’t get out of bed and do something. The only problem was that the kittens were a half an hour drive away. And it was 2am.

I need to take a moment here to talk about my husband. Matt is allergic to animals and his allergy can trigger his asthma. It took me many years to face up to how serious asthma can be – mainly because I’ve spent my whole life with animals and just couldn’t comprehend how they could make anyone ill. He’s okay with cats, but after seeing Matt around dogs and horses, it’s clear how unwell they make him. I mention this because Matt didn’t grow up with pets like I did, so he doesn’t have an affinity for them. However, despite this, when I woke him up at 2am on a work night to tell him we needed to drive half an hour to rescue some kittens, he did it. Because he is a wonderful human being.

We quietly got Goobie out of bed and into the car. Then we set off. Our plan was simple: we’d get the kittens, bring them back home for the night then take them to the nearest rescue centre in the morning. Ha!

When we got there we realised that our plan might take slightly longer than anticipated, for three reasons:

1) the bush the kittens were in was massive
2) the kittens had gone quiet so we weren’t sure they were still in the bush
3) it was very dark

The pregnant lady was also still up and helped us by getting torches and a broom to move the vegetation. She told us she’d been feeding the mother cat for a year and had watched the kittens over the last couple of weeks. It turned out that I’d heard about the dog that’d killed the mother. He was a Cyprus hunting dog who had been rescued himself six months earlier after being abandoned. I remember the photos; he looked like a skeleton, he must have walked miles before being rescued. The community donated money to rehabilitate him.

After half an hour of searching, we decided the kittens had left the bush and so we searched the neighbourhood. Not a sign. There were just so many places they could be hiding. We were going to call it a night and I said I’d just have a final look in the bush before going.  I climbed into the very middle and there they were. Three pairs of terrified eyes staring up at me. One kitten was black and invisible apart from his eyes. I scooped him up first and handed him to Matt, who had a box to put them in. He was tiny but he still managed to bite Matt – he had to have a tetanus injection the next day. After 10 minutes, I had the second one, a fluffy tri-colour. And the third one? Bloody hell!

The third one was ginger and a feisty little thing. He’d seen what had happened to his litter mates and was having none of it. He took off and disappeared into another part of the bush. He was tiny and it was a big bush to hide in. I realised an hour into searching for him that the bush was also perfect snake territory (it was – two vipers were seen near it a week later), but I figured that mummy-cat wouldn’t have put her kittens somewhere where there were predators.

It took us two hours to catch the ginger kitten. I still remember the image of Matt stretched out on his stomach under the bush, trying to contain the kitten to a particular area. We so wanted to give up and get to bed, but how could we leave this kitten on his own when he would certainly die?

Goobie had been sitting quietly in the car the whole time – awake as it turned out. He understood what we were doing but I’m still amazed that he didn’t make any fuss. Finally, we got the kittens in the car and drove back home. We got an hour’s sleep before it was time to get up.

In the morning, the plan was simple. Feed them and take them to a rescue centre. We paid an early-morning visit to a woman who’d offered us kitten milk. She’d rescued a 2-day old litter of 5 a few weeks earlier. Only one had survived, which was miraculous. He was tiny but he was going to make it. This woman made the full reality of our situation clear: there wasn’t anywhere to take these kittens. The nearby sanctuary couldn’t take them and other shelters only took dogs. Cats are seen as being better survivors so aren’t the priority – perhaps true for adult cats, but not kittens.

I left the woman’s house in a panic, like how I imagine it feels when you have an unwanted pregnancy. I now had FIVE cats! And my husband has a fur allergy. I took them to the nearest vet who wormed and vaccinated them at a discount. The vet told us the kittens were 7 weeks old and needed socialising otherwise they’d never make good pets. So from that day, me, Goobie, our neighbours and their children gave the kittens as much attention, cuddles and playtime as we could. We called the ginger one Feisty-Pants because he seemed to be the protector. Goobie named the black boy Black Wheel and the tri-colour girl Girlfriend. Yes, catchy. When we got them they were skin and bone with rounded, worm-ridden bellies, but as the weeks passed they filled out and grew.

But here’s the thing. If you are going to devote that much time caring and socialising them, you are going to fall in love. And that’s what happened. Hook, line and sinker. I always had a soft spot for Feisty – he’d been so brave but looked at me as though he still needed saving. Girlfriend was incredibly affectionate – she pulled on my heart strings a little too much and I tried – and failed – to stay a little detached. She was semi-long-haired and we could never have kept her permanently because of Matt’s allergy. And dear, vulnerable, shy Black Wheel. I fretted about him for weeks. I could just feel that he wasn’t quite right. I found out that the vet hadn’t spotted that he had severe ear mites, which can be lethal in kittens. We started weeks of treatment and finally he was better and started coming out of his shell. He was a special soul.

I advertised the kittens for homes all over Facebook. I even produced posters. I dreaded them finding homes, but we couldn’t keep them. We already had our two Abyssinians, Elf and Pippin. But then, we received a message from the sister of our neighbour. She lived in the UK and wanted to give Black Wheel and Girlfriend a home. We Skyped and it was clear that she would offer the perfect home. They were given new names; Black Wheel was now Django and Girlfriend was Harley.

We set about organising their pet passports, plane tickets and rabies jabs. They have to be over a certain weight before they can have a rabies jab, then you have to wait 28 days for it to work. So they stayed with us for almost three months. I cried on and off for the week leading up to their flight. I cried all the way to the airport. I cried all the way home. Saying goodbye to Harley and Django was one of the most difficult things I’ve had to do. They felt like my babies. Their new mummy, Sally, was so wonderful, texting me when they arrived in the UK, sending me lots of videos. Six months later, we visited them in the UK and finally met Sally in person. Those kittens are totally cherished and given everything they need – and more.

And what about the ginger kitten, Feisty? We kept him, of course. Except now he is called Frodo. And now he is the very opposite of feisty. We’ve had him for a year and I have never known such a laid-back cat. We laugh about how we used to call him Feisty-Pants. Goobie and Frodo seem to have a special connection. He lets Goobie carry him everywhere and, at night, he goes to sleep with Goobie, curled up on his pillow. For these kittens, they had a Happy Ever After.

But what about the countless other cats in need? I’ve been told I need to harden up. I have a bit – I’m not as shocked by things as I was last year. But that doesn’t alter the fact that I will never ignore an animal in need.

Every life matters, regardless of whether you’re a cat, dog, or human.