This video appears to have been made in Iraq fairly recently. The man is Muntadher al-Zaidi, a journalist. He has quite a big following on Twitter. This sweet little cat is all over him. She desperately needs a human companion to care for her. I have assumed her to be female. He saw her on the street. Perhaps he approached and immediately the cat clearly demonstrates her need for human companionship.
courting of a cat
I find this cat beside the street ,suddenly she begin courting me
it seems that she like me..☺️ pic.twitter.com/Pi2oJNAvzm— Muntadhar al-Zaidi (@muntazer_zaidi) January 10, 2019
It is sad. I am sure that Muntadher al-Zaidi was unable to adopt her. She is probably still on the street struggling to survive in a country were people can find it hard to survive as the country comes out of the ISIS Caliphate.
Iraq and cats
In Iraq there’ll be lots of street cats, aka community cats. It has not been a place to be cat for quite a long time but it’s changing. For instance, Basra in the south has a boarding cattery (cat hotel), 4Cats Pet Hotel. It is the first in the country. It costs about $6 (US) per night (7,000 Iraqi Dinars).
Stray cats in Iraq often face cruelty and sometimes extermination. It is a failure of cat domestication. Hardly anyone discusses it.
I am told (The National) that ten years ago the authorities embarked in the mass shooting of thousands of stray dogs in Baghdad with automatic rifles. Can you believe it?
There is a slight change. There are animal lovers in Iraq and they are trying to save the lives of stray cats and dogs. One such guy is Assan Attallah, 22, an agricultural student. He saved the lives of six dogs.
The less well educated in Iraq don’t believe that cats and dogs have feelings and don’t understand. They see animals as unimportant. They probably don’t believe that cats feel pain. These are ideas that were around hundreds of years ago in the West. They’d rather cull them than save their lives. They want to focus on humans. I understand that but the animals of Iraq have been through hell and people put them through it. They have a duty to make reparation and to be civilised and this means treating animals humanely and decently. They won’t understand these thoughts. Parts of the world are so backward and unsophisticated, in truth.
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This is hard to think about but the absolute hardest is what the cats and dogs endure and mostly are fatal victims of. The suffering and failure of humans there to realize and care about it is too sad to bear. If only for this reason alone I can’t feel any sympathy for human plight or differences there.
I feel exactly the same way. The longer I run this site the more despondent I become about the domestication of the cat globally. The US is not bad – generally pretty good but for things like declawing which is a horrible stain on the landscape. But go elsewhere and you see so much suffering and ignorance about cat welfare. It is awful. On a global level the domestication of the cat is a failure.
It’s hard, if nigh impossible for the uneducated and brutalised to understand that human beings are ‘animals’ too
Similar to you, I often find it hard to experience anything approaching empathy for humans who harm other species, whatever their circumstances….
…ignorance & war, ignorance & neglect, ignorance & rage, ignorance & emotional pain, ignorance & physical pain, ignorance & harm, ignorance with no intelligence, ignorance and religious creed or faith….
Ignorance = the ultimate enemy.
It starts wars, it’s behind every harmful act that humans perpetuate on other species and the whole planet.
Add a couple of molecules of greed and you have exactly where we are today.
Fucked.