All over the world there are community cats. Often the general feeling is that they live reasonable lives. These are cats that don’t have owners, a specific caregiver. They are rather loosely cared for by people living in the community; shop owners, perhaps workers and passers-by and residents. They might be attached to a particular business or shop where the owner feeds them. The caregiving amounts to feeding essentially.
But feeding a community cat is only part of what is necessary, isn’t it? The other part is veterinary care. In all but exceptional cases, community cats don’t receive veterinary care. A big failing in the concept of community cats.
TNR cat colonies are not really community cats. These are cats looked after by volunteers who ensure that they are neutered and fed. Because they’d been neutered, they have seen a veterinarian. They get a certain amount of veterinary care perhaps on occasions even better than cats looked after by an owner.
Life for TNR cats can be quite reasonable and better sometimes as mentioned than cats owned by an individual. However, community cats are a different kettle of fish.
Recoleta Cemetery
And the good example is the cats living in a cemetery in Buenos Aires. It is the Recoleta Cemetery, famous for stray cats. I would call them community cats because they been consistently fed by a person and at the moment that person is a dedicated cat lover, a local florist named Marcelo Pisani. He visits the cemetery every day at about 5:30 AM to feed the cats. He does it with dedication and doesn’t miss a day. That’s obvious necessary because cats need to be fed every day and therefore, he is anchored to his duties.
![Arturito, a stray cat from outside the cemetery, visits daily to benefit from Pisani’s feedings [Maria Amasanti/Al Jazeera]](https://pictures-of-cats.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/Arturito-a-stray-cat-from-outside-the-cemetery-visits-daily-to-benefit-from-Pisanis-feedings-700x469.webp)
Good for him. I admire the man. But he is not the kind of man is going to be able to afford to take all the cats to a veterinarian for a checkup and necessary treatment. That’s not criticising him. It’s simply a practicality. Although donations are received and some vet care administered. But this does not change the general weakness in community cat care: lack of proper vet treatment.
The cats of Recoleta Cemetery have declined in numbers since times past when there were about 60. They were a tourist attraction. The cats were part and parcel of the cemetery. If you visited it you wanted to visit the cats as well as the architecture of the cemetery.
But they have gradually been whittled down not, it seems, through persecution but from cat welfare advocates who have ensured that they’ve been adopted gradually over time.
Of course, there’s the usual tension between animal advocates and people who want stray cats removed from the environment. The former want to look after the cats in the community whereas the latter want them removed because they see them as spreading disease. Cats don’t spread disease in truth any more than humans and certainly less so in fact.
Back in the 1990s a wealthy widow looked after the cats. She paid for daily feedings and regular flea treatments. She made efforts to move the cats into adopted homes. She had the financial clout to provide some form of at least minimal veterinary treatment but nearly in every case, community cats don’t receive veterinary treatment.
Community cats and all stray cats are actually very photogenic. We would like to photograph them which is one reason why tourists visited the cemetery. Cats make good photographic subjects. Behind that image, there are health issues for the felines. It isn’t always noticeable to tourists passing through.
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Carmen Marconi and Senor
One person who did adopt a Recoleta Cemetery cat is Carmen Marconi. She lives locally and she adopted an 11-year-old gray male who she named Señor. She worried whether she was doing the right thing because she had taken him from the freedom of living at the cemetery and placed him in a small apartment. He had become a full-time indoor cat in a confined space. But he received veterinary treatment.
It was a trade-off. She felt bad but she also felt that she did the right thing because his health improved and he is now 17-years-of-age. She took him to a veterinarian after she adopted him, who diagnosed dehydration, and an unspecified ear disorder but probably something like air mites and a bacterial infection, and toxoplasmosis which affects a lot of stray cats. Señor received veterinary treatment and his condition improved.
Is he happier living in a tiny apartment but being healthier than he was living free in a cemetery without medical care? That’s a philosophical question really but domestic cats are meant to be domestic cats living in a home. Therefore, he is better off in my view and in any case, Ms Marconi can take him for a walk on a lead if she wants to.
The florist relies on donations from tourist to pay for cat food. Some money goes into medication I’m told. Although we don’t know the extent of it. This doesn’t change the general tenor of this article which is that community cats don’t receive medical treatment normally, a failing in that concept. And you will find that in many parts of the world, there are far more community cats than there are domestic cats living in homes.
Nowadays, when cats are abandoned at the cemetery, Pisani, the florist, and others do their best to find an adopter to give them a new home. There are now just six cats left. All of them have been spayed and neutered and so the community cats of Recoleta Cemetery have all but disappeared. That’s the right outcome although the tourists are dissatisfied.
