Save A Gato

I'm not sure what made me think about this today, it's probably spending the afternoon with Spider. I realize how spoiled and loved and fortunate our cats are. Hairy was unwanted by her previous owners when she came to live with James. Spider was a stray kitten who showed up at the front door of my workplace in the freezing cold of January. Romeo wandered onto our front porch one day and never left, so we took him into our home. Maarten and General were rescues and being fostered at a kitten shelter when we saw them online and decided to adopt them. We were lucky to "find" all of them, and can't imagine our life and our home without our kitties sharing it with us. I've posted before about adopting from your local shelter, and of course, I highly recommend considering the hardest to adopt out cat- the black cat! But knowing how happy and thriving our kitties are, it made me think of some not so fortunate kitties we saw recently. In Old San Juan, Puerto Rico there is a large feral colony of cats who roam the area, hungry and diseased and alone, all there in the beautiful tropical paradise. We did see food and water bowls kindly placed here and there, but all were empty. I'm sure when one food bowl is filled, dozens of cats try to get their next meal from it. Most of the cats we saw were friendly, some ran off, some hid in the foliage watching us cautiously, but few allowed us to pet them. We were shocked at how many we saw while strolling along the waterfront. Being cat lovers, we of course were also charmed by the little faces of kittens peeking out from behind trees and bushes. Of course, those kittens are sadly one of the problems of uncontrolled breeding, and as precious as they were they should not have been there in the first place. However, there are groups in San Juan dedicated to helping this colony, even though from what I've read there are those who want to just get rid of the cats. We bought a few items in a shop that donated the proceeds to helping feed the cats. For more information, please go to the website, Save A Gato. You can make a donation, and of course they have lots of sweet and lovable kitties up for adoption.

Here are a few photos we took of just a few of the kitties we saw there in Old San Juan. There were many many many many more of them that we saw........