About cats and friend

Cats watching the sea. Cats waiting for the popping of human lips, sign of the arrival of food. Maimed cats not knowing as they are because they were born this way. Small and fearful cats. Black cats most of the night. Safe and fearless cats. Hungry cats friends of fishermen. Cats. Many cats.

"My tour starts at five and ends at eight in the evening. I feed 120 cats of 12 colonies, all at my expense. Everyday". While listening to Maria Rita, I am distracted by a cat inside a cage. We are in the infirmary. It is immobile, suffering, but not resigned, attached to life as only animals can do.

Maria Rita and I live in a dimension foreign to many. A dimension of good feelings and actions for cats. Reflecting others, indifferent, but we are not interested.

Maria Rita is a French teacher and now that she is retired she lives in Favignana both in summer and in winter to take care of the many colonies of stray cats on the island. As in almost all the Italian islands, they are very many, hungry, present everywhere and abandoned to themselves.

Few residents adopt a cat, it is more likely that their leftover food end up in the street or beside the garbage cans where in a few seconds arrive one or two dozen cats (and you wonder where, because until just before there was not one).

In a corner of the room there are many bags of croquettes. "1000 € of dry food, is the donation of a lady of Lecco" says Maria Rita anticipating my questions. "Donations come only from the north or from people in the north; the islanders are insensitive to the problem and many even bothered. "

Hungry cats friends of fishermen. Cats. Many cats.

The strength of this woman and the knowledge with the veterinary Roberto Rosental from Modena, led to the creation, in 2015, the association, the SAIE Relief Pets Egadi with an initial contribution of the town of three thousand euro, and the locals for a stalemate. The collaboration of Dr. Rosental is essential for the association whose program is to vaccinate the kittens, to remove worms from them and to sterilize them to significantly reduce births and, of course, rescue those sick and accident victims.

35 are the cats loved by Maria Rita.

82 cats vaccinated in 2016

150 those sterilized

34 adoptions

But the real dream of Maria Rita and the few people who help her is to make the inhabitants of the island more aware so that they can learn to live with cats. Are we not creatures of the same God?

And who knows, maybe one day Favignana will be the Tashiro Island of the Mediterranean.