Cruelty to cats
Supposedly, one of the many advantages of moving out into the countryside is that life will be much more pleasant and much safer for one's pets. The cats, for instance. It always seemed in the city as if it were merely a matter of time before they were run over. Out here, though, with only a single dirt road leading to a dead end and hardly any traffic, what dangers could there possibly be? The phrase, "Where sheep may safely graze," quickly came to mind (even though cats and dogs do very little grazing) and there was a warm feeling at the idea of finding a safe haven for animals that might otherwise come to a horrible and untimely end.
Wrong.
We hadn't realized how malicious some of the apparently easy-going country types in this quiet valley coul be. It seems that they sleep easily at night after putting poisoned food in strategic places to kill animals that are not theirs.
These are hard and brutal people. In the beginning it didn't seem that way. They seemed innocent enough, looking after their chickens, their rabbits and their goats. One almost imagined that they were still in touch with something that has now been obliterated in our urban non-civilization. The signs of a deeper, bitter cruelty were there, but we overlooked them. On one occasion, one of their cats had kittens in one of our storerooms. Our elderly neighbour - his boots having long lost their laces - came with a blue plastic bag. Without a second thought he roughly picked up the kittens from the straw-lined corner of the storeroom, put them into the plastic bag, tied the handles together into a knot with his coarse hands and took them away. "Where was he going to take them?" we asked him. He was going to chuck them in the river, he said. A quick drowning might have been a blessing, but the river is dry and it must have been a long and painful death in the tight plastic on the stones of the river bed scorching in the hot sun.
O Kourthos
The latest cat to fall victim to these repulsive specimens of what passes for humanity was Kourthos (pictured here while trying to work out if it is okay to eat snakes). Before he was more than 18 months old he died a terrible, lingering death, almost certainly (the vet told us later) from a massive dose of rat poison (a poison that causes a slow death from internal bleeding). That was the only time we found one of our poisoned pets while they were still alive but it was a thousand times worse to have to witness such a horrible death.
It may have been true that Kourthos had been sneaking into the neighbour's storeroom through a broken window and then eating tiny pawfuls of food, but instead of fixing the window he decided to kill the cat.
Man's inhumanity to just about everything really does seem to know almost no bounds at all.
O Xethoriasmenos
At the moment we are also worried about Xethoriasmenos who has been missing for a few days now. It is not unusual for him to wander off in search of more interesting company and not be seen here for a couple of days. But this is more than a couple of days. We fear the worst.
Update: Xethoriasmenos hasn't been seen now for over three weeks so we have to assume the worst.
O Mavros
Not so long ago someone gave us O Mavros. He has been a really nice guy and has not been inclined to scratch at the door. Just a little whine and he knows that the food will be on its way. And he has never strayed far. Until recently.
An aside: It is somewhat distressing to see the degree to which male cats (like their human equivalents) are victims of their testicular tissue. If it weren't for this wretched testicularly driven urge to procreate, O Mavros would be content to sit around outside, chase the odd mouse, climb the odd tree, play with the Didimoi and wait for the regular plates of spaghetti. Now the adolescent restlessness is beginning, he disappears for long periods of time, unaware of the terrible threats that lurk out there.
Oi Didimoi
The latest additions are the Didimoi - twins, completely indistinguishable, abandoned outside a monastery. Fortunately they get on well with the Mavros.
