Walking with My Neighbors, or How I Rediscovered My Feline Identity
Varna, Bulgaria, January 14th, 2020
Salaroche

There are plenty of street cats in my neighborhood and the more I observe them the more they interest me. Actually, the more I watch them the more they fascinate me and the more I identify with them.

Street cats usually come in two major categories, stray ones and feral ones. At first sight, it is impossible to know whether my feline neighbors are of the stray or of the feral kind, although I would venture to speculate that a few of them show some qualities proper of the stray variety.

A stray cat is one that has been owned by someone in the past, but that somehow got lost, was abandoned, or one day simply ran away from home and never went back. In contrast, a feral cat is one that was born in the streets or in the wilderness and has never been owned by anybody. Both kinds of cats live either in the streets or near cities or farms in the countryside and looking at them from afar there is no way of knowing which is which. One way to tell them apart, however, is by their social skills.

Stray cats show different degrees of sociability with humans, depending on the level of domestication they internalized while they lived in a home, while feral ones are rather sullen, tend to avoid contact with humans or simply try to keep themselves out of sight during the day and come out mostly at night.

Every time I go out of my apartment, I cross paths with some of my feline neighbors. By now I can already recognize a small number of them that I’ve seen before, as they usually hang out around the same dumpsters.

I see them crossing the streets, coming out from under the cars in parking lots or simply scavenging on top of the mounds of trash in the dumpsters. They always look beautiful and graceful and whenever they walk, they all do it with the same “king of the jungle” swagger that never ceases to impress me. Some of them look cleaner than some others, but they all look at me with that certain rogue spark in their eyes as if telling me “I am a free being, what about you? I follow my natural instincts, what about you?”

I have seen many of these intriguing furry creatures in a few different places where I have been and I have noticed they are more numerous in some cities and countries than in some others. For example, there were a good number of them in the streets of Baku, Azerbaijan, and there are a larger number of them here in Varna, Bulgaria, but the country where I have seen the largest population of street cats is Malta.

During a period of six months, between 2008 and 2009, while I lived in Malta in the district of Sliema, very near the district of San Julian, just in my block I saw at least half a dozen different street cats.

But that was nothing. One day I drove to the southeast side of the island to take a look at the Blue Grotto, a site by the sea that comprises a few sea caves, and while I was sitting at a café having a glass of wine with a couple of German ladies, I saw a few cats coming out of the bushes across the street.

So, I just said out loud, “wow! Look at that bunch of cats!”, to which a Maltese guy standing by the sidewalk responded “Oh, that’s nothing! You really want to see some cats? Check this out!”, and after saying that he whistled very loud. And, lo and behold! Not even a couple of seconds later, a band of at least 20 cats sprang out of the bushes with their eyes focused on the man.

Later on, after talking to the man, I found out that, on a daily basis, he feeds those cats whatever leftovers he can gather at home and at the restaurant, so that at that point in time they all recognized his whistling and knew him well.

Looking back at that feline Maltese episode, I could speculate that those cats were of a hybrid kind between stray and feral, as they were domesticated enough to heed the man’s whistling, but feral enough to live in the bushes. Whether those cats were born in a home or in the wild is something that nor you or I will ever know, but that never mattered.

As far as California cats are concerned, I cannot recall enough instances of memorable feline encounters that may warrant talking about them here, but that may be because I hardly ever lived for long periods of time in any of the larger cities like San Francisco, Los Angeles or even San Diego, cities where it is safe to assume the feline population is much larger that in Palo Alto or Santa Barbara, not to mention Carpinteria, Summerland or Menlo Park, smaller cities where I actually lived for relatively long periods of time.

The truth is cats have always attracted my eye, but never with the intensity that they do today. Lately I have actually been sensing that, in some significant ways, I am like a street cat replicant at the human-world level. Those little guys move freely from one street to the next and don’t seem to have any attachment to anyone or anything. I too, move from one city or country to the next and I certainly don’t have for the moment any binding attachment to anyone or anything.

There are some stray-cat characteristics in me, but there are some feral ones too. When I was a young boy, for example, I was certainly domesticated enough to withstand many of the exigencies of civilization, but deep in my mind I always felt like a stray cat, as I never really conceived myself as part of my so-called family. And as far as socializing was concerned, I always avoided human contact to the largest possible extent, that is, until I reached puberty and my hormonal structure began to change.

I actually remember with much clarity one time my parents sent me to live for two or three months with my maternal grandfather Miguel. I must have been around 6 or 7 years old. My grandfather had a gas station, which was built as an extension to his nice two-storied house. He was living there with his second wife, as my maternal grandmother had passed away a few years before.

My grandfather was a very kind and sociable man. In contrast, I was rather quiet and always kept to myself, which earned me the moniker of “the little wild one”, which made me feel good, as at that point in time I used to think all human relations were pure hogwash. Thus, on my internal side I was some sort of a stray cat and on my external side I was some kind of a feral one, which is like saying I had all the characteristics of a street cat, hence, I think, my present fascination with my feline neighbors.

But the beginning of the gradual rediscovery of my feline identity I owe it entirely to an English colleague I had in Baku, Azerbaijan. To begin with, she is one of the kindest and most easy-going persons I have ever met, but what left an indelible memory in my mind is her spontaneous love for cats.

I can remember with perfect clarity one time she and I were walking by a supermarket, down a wide street in Baku, when she suddenly stopped and started searching for something in her bag. Then she pulled out a small plastic bag that looked like a peanut bag or something, she opened the little bag and then snuggled down on the sidewalk to start spreading cat food at the feet of a white cat sitting by the supermarket door.

The beauty of that scene was perfectly unforgettable and since that day I love all street cats. What’s more, by now I even identify with them. But that cat-feeding scene was not an isolated one. She would actually do the same every time we crossed paths with a cat and I am sure she does it even now when she is walking by herself. On second thought, would you think my colleague was really Catwoman in disguise? Possibly.

Meanwhile, I might just go buy some cat food later today and go feed my feline friends, although I would need to buy a good amount of it if I decide to do it, as those neighbors of mine are not few. But I know where to find them. By now I know the spots where they usually hang out. And maybe by now a couple of them can even recognize me, just as I can recognize some of them. After all, we are all neighbors.

May the universal forces bless all the street cats in the world and their home counterparts too.

Salaroche