The Cats of Rome – Rethought

Over two years ago (my God have I been doing this that long?!) I did a post on the cats of Rome. Yes, they are an institution in Rome and yes, there are people all over the city that feed them. I recently saw an article in the NY Times. There is a major cat sanctuary in the city in the Torre Argentina which is also considered a major architectural site. So now the city has decided the cats have to go. Since I wrote the original post my perspective on i gatti randagi (the feral cats) has changed considerably. I have had cats for the last 20 years until a couple of years ago when the last two came to the end of their lives. They are independent creatures who take care of themselves only demanding that you know who is the boss the house. I can live with that. However for almost two years now I have lived in an apartment which is unfortunately right next door to a house where the inhabitants have taken it upon themselves to feed homeless cats. How nice you say. But not so fast.

 

Those cut little creatures when they are household pets do an admirable job of being clean and, unlike dogs, are quite tidy when it comes to the byproducts of eating and drinking – i.e. pissing and shitting. However it is easy to observe that when a bunch of them are sharing an area this habit goes by the wayside. You can no longer safely walk almost anywhere without encountering little mounds of fetid, foul smelling cat shit. And believe me it smells worse than what comes out of dogs. The neighbors are singularly cavalier about the effect of this on their neighbors and really don’t seem to give a, well, shit about how the neighbors are affected by their kindness to what I now consider pests. I hope that the landlord can figure out a solution – otherwise I will need to move from an apartment that I like otherwise.

Oh, yes I added the category of language to this post. I found that the third time that I accidentally stepped into a recently left pile I found that after I ran out of English curses I started in with the Italian ones.

If you’d like to read the whole NYTimes article here is a link.

 

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 1st, 2012 at 1:14 pm and is filed under Culture, Language, Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.