Rescuing a cat from abroad is easy if you do this first

Every summer millions of Britons who go overseas on holiday will fall in love. We're not talking about conventional holiday romances though, but of striking up a bond with a street cat. Although our feline population is largely domesticated, chipped and fed twice a day, in other countries they may not be so well looked after.

Many places popular with holidaying Britons have large numbers of cats which are variously underfed, over-fertile, stray or fully feral. From Greece to Morocco, Tunisia to Turkey, the streets of tourist areas are often teeming with them. But despite their often difficult lives, these affection-starved cats can be easy to fall for and some may feel the need to help or even to bring one home - I include myself as one of them.

The Bardo museum in Tunis is an oasis of calm in a hot and hectic city: a 400-year-old palace with large, airy marble-clad rooms housing one of the best collections of Roman mosaics and other classical antiquities in the world. It's the last place you'd expect to find a prospective pet.

But that's what happened during our recent trip to the city.

We found an outdoor cafe in the museum complex where we took a break from exploring the 2,000-year-old ruins of Carthage. We had just ordered coffee when a particularly charming cat strolled up. He was white with tabby patches, a little scrawny by UK standards, but very friendly.

I didn't even need to bribe him with food before he was preening in my lap to be stroked. And after half an hour of this, we were like old friends.

He was simply adorable. And even though we have already accumulated three cats at our London home, I found myself seriously considering the possibility of bringing him home. The only thing that stopped me, in fact, was there simply wasn't time to arrange this before our booked flight home.

What happened to me at the Bardo will be a familiar experience to tens of thousands of UK holidaymakers visiting countries around the world - the sudden but intense feeling of affection for a cat that wanders up apparently ownerless.

Tunisia is simply teeming with cats. And it's been the same on other holidays we have taken across Europe, North Africa and further afield.

In Greece, which is probably the cattiest of them all, we even found stray cats preening in and out of the ruins of the Parthenon, allowing me to make the joke "Acropolis Meow" in the caption on one of my photos.

In the UK, there are now a handful of so-called cat cafes, places with names like Whiskers and Cream, where the presence of loveable felines is a novelty draw for coffee and cake enthusiasts. But abroad, we often find this at pretty much every cafe or restaurant we visit.

They particularly frequent these places as they can live on what scraps of discarded food they can scavenge while for the cafe owners this is preferable to having mice or rats do the same.

Plus the tourists often like them. But these cats are, in many ways, unlike those we know and love at home.

The most obvious point of difference being size: they are frequently much skinnier than their UK counterparts because, quite simply, they are not being given two portions of shop-bought cat food a day but instead are having to forage for their meals.

And similarly, they won't be getting flea or worming treatments, jabs against infection or veterinary treatment for any ailment. Consequently they have a much lower quality of life, life expectancy - and expectation of affection and support from human beings.

Nonetheless they are often very, very easy to fall for emotionally, that extra dimension of neediness adding a poignant note to the human-animal exchange.

I often think of the disparity between the felines we have at home and those we meet abroad in terms of those depicted in perhaps the greatest movie about the species ever made: the 1970 Disney film The Aristocats.

British cats are like the grand Eva Gabor-voiced cat, Duchess, and her kittens, born with a silver spoon, whereas many of their continental counterparts are of the more streetwise Thomas O'Malley, the alley cat variety.

Their cats are as close to our urban foxes as to domestic pets as we know them here.

The quickest way to their hearts is food.

Since a trip to the Greek island of Hydra, where there seemed to be more cats than people, I have taken to packing the branded snack Dreamies when I go on these trips as I know how well they will be received. And I'm not alone in being charmed by these animals with tough lives but open hearts.

My friend Rachel can no longer bear to go anywhere she may encounter feline suffering, while another, Sophie, is known to leave a bar owner £100 on leaving for home in exchange for a promise to feed her favourites in coming weeks.

Once, on our last night in Spain, my wife was apparently seriously saying she was going to drug a cat and put it in her suitcase and take it through customs - I thought I was going to have to drug her to get her to the airport with no cat.

Thankfully she was teasing me. But there are charities which will help people who find themselves emotionally too involved to walk away and want to bring cats home - without resorting to feline smuggling.

Take the experience of Stef Burgon and Simon Hunt who live in Crinan, a small village on the west coast of Scotland, but who were previously based in Dubai. "We moved here in 2019 with the cat we had in Dubai. When he passed away we knew we wanted to adopt from Dubai again," says Stef.

"We knew how hard a life cats have there so we were determined to give a Dubai cat a new chance. They're just brilliant cats - streetwise, friendly but very loving at the same time.

"We worked with a charity called Desert Paws and they helped bring over a group of cats a year ago, including ours.

"We named our new boy Ravi after our favourite Dubai restaurant. He's taken to life in Scotland so well, he's amazing.

"He actually comes on walks with us - up to three miles - not on a lead, he just follows us up the hill and around the countryside.

"He also goes out on the pier to welcome the fishing boats in and even once tried to board one - and fell in. You don't get that in Dubai." The whole adoption of Ravi cost them just £150.

"I wish more people would look at this way of finding a cat - you would be helping out," says Stef.

And there are many expat Brits who become 'cativists' - feline activists - who volunteer to help cats abroad. Typical is retired Jacky Story who lives on the island of Syros, Greece, running a charity that feeds, neuters and ideally rescues street cats.

Every cat they feed has its own barcode which links to a page with its name, age and profile so that anyone smitten is quickly armed with the information that could hopefully lead to them adopting it.

"I never intended to get this involved with cats - but the cats found me," says Jacky.

"I was living next door to a butcher on the island and he had dozens of them hanging around for scraps and when his shop closed down they started coming to me.

"Now I have as many as 60 cats in or around my home at any one time.

"We find that British people do fall for cats while on holiday. The main stumbling block for adoption is that they need to wait 21 days after a rabies jab before they can travel but we can help with the logistics around that. We now typically rescue 20 to 30 cats a year and send them to the UK as pets. It can be relatively cheap if you organise it properly."

As with Stef in Dubai, Jacky says cats can be legally brought to the UK for as little as £150. And with kittens in the UK typically changing hands for double this, it's certainly not an insane extravagance to adopt overseas.

And there are others who work in these countries to reduce the number of strays through neutering programmes while improving the quality of life for those we already have.

One of the frustrations of our Tunisian experience was that there wasn't a donation bucket at the airport where all that unused currency (you're not meant to take it out of the country) could be donated to help those poor animals.

Thankfully there are people - often British expats - out there doing just this.

Photographer Anne Heslop bought a house in Morocco on a whim 15 years ago, but soon realised she found the condition and plight of the street animals heartbreaking.

"I couldn't stay and do nothing," she recalled. "I realised I was going to have to either give up my house and leave or find a way to help them."

Anne chose to stay and teamed up with a local vet to found the charity 'ERHAM', which means 'Take Pity' in Arabic. Their main goal is to sterilise cats to keep the numbers down and improve life quality.

She explains: "We have operated on over 1,500 cats now, mostly female and it's wonderful to see so many healthy sterilised cats around the town these days.

"The local people are very appreciative and it's good to know we've done something to help their loved street cats."

Among her many rescues is the notable case of 'Earth', a pretty white and ginger cat, who was given that name having been found injured after being caught up in the 2023 Moroccan earthquake. Anne recalls: "She was lying in a market place, drifting in and out of consciousness. Her leg was badly injured and infected and to save her, her leg needed to be amputated. We weren't sure she would even survive the operation, but she went on to fully recover and become a very affectionate and inquisitive three-legged pet.

"Having completed all necessary vaccinations and paperwork I recently brought her to the UK where she now lives with a lovely young couple in a country house near Windsor. Hers is a real rags to riches story."

Of course, Anne's work does not always have these happy endings - she's the first to admit that there are simply too many cats out there to be able to help them all - but she is doing all she can. If you're interested in homing a cat from overseas, Anne can advise you.

To find out more visit the ERHAM facebook page via facebook.com/ERHAMCATS or, to make a donation, visit gofundme.com/f/Help-for-Kittens-Dumped-on-a-Rubbish-Tip---Morocco