- Spaying and neutering all the cats in the colony.
- Giving food and water on a daily basis.
- Monitoring and dealing with any medical issues.
Caring for a colony is expensive and time consuming but so rewarding. However there are numerous issues that we face:
- Dealing with people complaining about the cats and wanting them removed.
- People dumping their unwanted pets in the colony - cats are territorial, this does not work!
- People dumping kittens they find on the streets into the colonies and thinking they will survive.
- Raising enough funds to cover the food, medical and spaying/neutering costs.
- The battle against the desert climate, it can reach 50 degrees in the summer!
- The constant worry that they stay safe living on the streets of Qatar - from traffic and humans.
There are very limited good homes for animals in Qatar and we can't unfortunately send every cat abroad to find a good home; there are far too many and it is just too expensive. So the extremely sad part is that we have some very friendly sweet cats in our colonies who would in other countries be in loving homes. These are the cats who are the biggest worry and who we have sleepless nights worrying about, often they are abandoned pets.
Ideally a colony cat should be wary of people and just approach for sustenance once the human moves away. If they are going to stay safe on the streets they should not allow a human to touch them and stay as feral as possible, these are the survivors!
If you start to feed a cat on the street, please do them a favour and do not make them friendly unless you are planning to take them off the streets and find them a home. Plus of course spay/neuter them, this is the only way we will eventually deal with the cat over-population, we can't rehome our way out of this situation.
If you could help please contact us, we are always in desperate need of people to monitor the colonies, even if you only have time once a week, the cats are so grateful for our visits and we would really appreciate your support.
