Morocco is full of cats
A cat fest, and cat commentary
I just got back from a trip to Morocco. It was my first time, and it’s easy to get overwhelmed. The vastness of the Sahara (which really looks like that), the colorful crowded energy of souks, the fantastic tile, the deep gorges and green oases.
And the cats.
Morocco has So. Many. Cats.
Every place that was even remotely inhabited had cats. Some clearly cared for, some definitely scruffy strays. Many pregnant, and most with a tipped ear that notes they’ve been vaccinated.
The cats aren’t pests. But they also aren’t truly pets. Some were obviously associated with particular houses, hotels, or shops. But others clearly just hung out wherever they fancied. People stepped neatly around them, worked around them, and handed them scraps. No one ever shooed them away.
After a while, I began to notice something. The streets of places like Fes and Marrekesh are not what you would call clean, but some of the small piles of brown stuff weren’t trash at all.
They were tiny piles of kibble. Cat kibble. Several times I saw people walking along take out a small plastic bag, and pour out a little handful of kibble near a cat. More often I saw cats begging, quite successfully, at restaurants.
The way people fed the cats reminded me of the way some people feed pigeons in cities. A few feed them on purpose, but most just toss a bit of sandwich they are eating. Either way, feeding the pigeons is about a connection, however brief, with an animal. In the pigeon’s case, an animal that once meant a great deal to people, but now means almost nothing at all. (For more on that I’m gonna go ahead and recommend my book on the topic!)
Seeing the interactions between people and cats reminded me strongly of the conversations I had with scholars of Islamic literature for my book. Morocco is a Muslim country, and what they told me seemed to apply here.
Cats are very important in Islam. Not because they have some spiritual significance or anything, but because the Prophet Mohammad liked them. There are numerous cat stories in the Hadīth, a collection of teachings and sayings of the Prophet. Cats are recognized, not as honored pets, but more as working animals. They are respected for the work they do of keeping away rodents (note: cats do hunt mice, they do NOT generally hunt rats, but a 2018 study shows cats and rats do AVOID each other which means that they do keep the rats away, especially if there are plenty of cats).
So the cats are entitled to root around in the trash, to get scraps from food vendors.
And they are entitled to make more cats. Because as Sarra Tlili, a professor of language and literature at the University of Florida, explained to me, some Muslims see Trapping, Neutering, and Returning cats as an act of violence.
So the cats remain. Some of them thrive. They make more cats.
It’s a very different way of existing with cats than most of us have in the US, and results in a very different number and presence of cats. And what I found fascinating is how much this difference derives from no major, deliberate decision. No government entity declared cats are a thing. No city decided to let the cats roam and encourage their presence.
This was a collective, mostly silent decision made of culture. Made of what people believe. Similarly, our way of keeping cats now in the US? Is also a decision of culture, made of what we believe. Where we believe cats belong, what we believe their responsibilities are, and how we think we should (or should not) be responsible for them.
Citation
Parsons, et al. “Temporal and Space-Use Changes by Rats in Response to Predation by Feral Cats in an Urban Ecosystem” Front. Ecol. Evol., 27 September 2018, Volume 6 - 2018 | https://doi.org/10.3389/fevo.2018.00146
Where have you been?
Please tell me it’s reading about this, our Dire Cheese Situation. In which brie and Camembert are on the block, and why? Because we all just had to up and prefer a non-reproducing fungus!
Maybe it’s reading about the death of Flaco the owl. I feel like Ryan has the take that I have. Which is…Flaco is complicated, and his life and death was about our own desires.
Maybe it’s reading about what IS a species anyway? Because if we can’t make up our minds about giraffes we are definitely lost when it comes to bacteria.
Or maybe it’s reading about….um, rat dicks. Fake, AI-generated rat dicks, how they got into a scientific journal, and what it means for scientific publishing.
Maybe it’s about how Google is testing life without a news tab. It’s dark.
Maybe it’s reading an adorable little comic about pygmy squid and how they can be trained to hang on different types of ocean plants.
And maybe it’s reading this lovely and important feature on why, exactly, we should save the sardine. Yes. The sardine. The anchovy. The bait. The lil guys.
Where have I been?
I got to give a lovely talk about my book at the Houston Natural Science Museum! If you came out, thank you! You were a lovely, engaged audience. And the museum staff are A+ amazing. I hope I can get back and just hang in that museum for a WHOLE DAY.
And where will I be? I will be in New York City on April 10! I’m giving a talk at NYU with Entomologist Gwen Pearson on how to write about unloved animals. Come out! In person and online.
This may not be me personally BUT…my book is in AIRPORTS!!! People have been sending me sightings and I cannot get enough of them! If you see them please shout them out!
Anti-Discourse Actions
Wow this is hard to keep. The Discourse is so strong. But I know it doesn’t help. I read the news, I know what’s going on. The vast, vast majority of the time my commentary will not make a difference! My ACTIONS, however, will.
So this time I’ve:
Complained to Substack about allowing far-right accounts a platform, and I’m taking particular aim at L1bsofT1kT0k, which has a large Substack of more than 100K followers. Currently my goal is to find a way to report every single one of their newsletters for hate speech. I’m going in every day. It probably won’t work. But it’s better (to me) than running off to another platform, dodging and weaving again and again.
I’ve joined Authors Against Book Bans! A great new initiative about protecting the freedom to read.
Donated to a friend in need.
Wrote to my reps about an important issue.
Less Discourse. More doing. Let’s go.
My teenage son spent 4 days in Morocco on a class trip, and he’s a cat guy, so he was pretty happy. He was in Tangier and Chefchaoen, and said the cats weren’t pettable, but since almost all his “vegetarian” food had fish on it, he made lots of friends under the tables.