and the baby makes eight
My chiffre des chats (cat total) has climbed up from 6 to 8. Marlee, the mother of almost every cat in our household, moved her new litter into our house a few weeks back..
The new arrivals are Little Monkey (see left) and a cute orange cat that is as of yet unnamed because of its unveiled hatred for us.
Now that most our kittens are full grown cats, the novelty of being the Quatre Bornes "cat house" has truly worn off. Despite the insistence of locals that cats can subsist on rice, our cats only dine on $12 bags of whiskers, and more importantly their appetite is insatiable.
If you do not feed the cats to their satisfaction, they will follow you around the house whining until you do. Or, when they are especially persistent, they will turn a corner and follow you on your three-block walk to your friend's house, and then wait outside the door until you leave (This, sadly, is a true story).
At this point, my roommate and I are easily spending $60 a month on catfood,
which is absolutely ridiculous. Even though Mauritius is Sub-Saharan Africa in "quotation marks," it's not difficult to think of how far that money would go in other parts of the region.
Not only is $60 a month easily more than I spend on my own groceries, it is also the basic salary of an EPZ worker in Kenya, and the amount it costs to send a kid to public school for a year in Tanzania. Suffice it to say, if I only could donate to a single charity, it would not be the Quatre Bornes Cat Preserve.
Anybody want a cat? If you ask nicely, I might even pay to ship them over to you... I'd be surprised if international courier services cost much more than our cat food does.
I'm at least half serious...
Labels: cats
