Kittens abandoned on a rubbish dump and left to die

I’m watching an emaciated kitten desperately trying to find the last drop of oil at the bottom of an empty sardine can. It seems too young to be away from its mother.

Another stands with its eyes swollen and infected, a known complication of cat flu.

Suddenly there are cats and kittens everywhere – all running in the same direction towards a lady carrying a bag of what turns out to be fish heads. Fatima has arrived and the cats are hungry.

As Fatima only speaks Arabic and I speak very little, her son translates for us. I find out Fatima has been doing this for years. She comes twice a day, once in the morning and once in the evening to feed and tend to the kittens. When I ask her why, she replies: ‘Allah wants me to do this.’ She tells me that the Prophet Muhammed had a special relationship with cats and praises those who take care of them.

The cats have been abandoned on the tip in Azemmour, Morocco. Fatima, a local resident, has laid out cardboard boxes to give them some kind of shelter. She feeds them a mixture of mostly couscous, fish heads and milk. I watch her tear open plastic bags containing leftover food that people had thrown towards, but not into the rubbish bins, so the cats and kittens could more easily scavenge for anything edible inside.

That was a few years ago.

Two weeks ago, having heard that Fatima’s beloved husband had recently died, I went to the tip to find her and offer my condolences. She was clearly changed and utterly overwhelmed by the amount of vulnerable kittens that had recently been dumped there.

There were approximately 60 of them. Two were disabled, some were under four weeks old and motherless, many were sick. There were also four corpses. Overwhelmed with grief from her husband’s death and the state of the ever-growing population of abandoned kittens, if there was ever a time this amazing woman needed support, it was now.

I had moved to the area five years before I met Fatima. And I was heartbroken at how often you would see kittens sick and dying in the streets.

It’s hard to imagine that people could put the lives of these innocent vulnerable kittens at risk, but with sterilisation being expensive and often unheard of, many local cat owners know no alternative but to abandon kittens.

Sometimes, stray kittens are also brought to the rubbish tip by well-meaning people who have heard about Fatima, the lady who takes care of cats.

Together, Fatima and ERHAM collected the abandoned kittens into boxes and treated them for parasites and fleas. We washed infected eyes and applied antibiotic eye cream, and the tiny ones were fed with kitten replacement milk. An incredible 94 kittens were cared for that day.

While we had the kittens under our control we cleaned the area they lived in and constructed a 3×3 metre concrete slab, with a tiled area for feeding. We also replaced the old boxes with new plastic-covered waterproof homes.

At first, we had quite a few loud objections from local people who believed we wanted to encourage others to leave kittens there. But when we hung our banner which read that being cruel to animals was ‘Haram’ (meaning forbidden behaviour) attitudes seemed to change. The banner also alerted people to ERHAM’s free sterilisation programme.

Over the next week, more and more kittens arrived frightened, unwanted and some already sick. Nursing mothers were dumped too and were soon overburdened with more abandoned tiny mouths to feed along with their own kittens.

Even if healthy kittens are dumped, they’re exposed to the viruses carried by the ones that are sick. Bacterial infections are also a big possibility from the rotting food in the festering rubbish pile on the other side of the tip. We tried to home the kittens as soon as they arrived but it quickly became clear it was an impossible task.

Mustapha, a friend who lives nearby in a small house with enclosed land, offered to take ten kittens into his garden with the hope of finding homes for them in his local community. He now has 19 and counting while his own cat sits on the wall, refusing to come home.

Another local lady took four kittens on to her roof terrace. Occasionally, people came to the tip to adopt which was amazing given that most people won’t come near it.

I have spent every waking moment of the last two weeks in Morocco trying to help Fatima and stabilise the kitten dumping crisis. We now have up to 200 hungry mouths to feed.

We’ve cleaned and treated hundreds of infected eyes, syringe-fed the young kittens and buried the corpses of the ones who didn’t make it.

We’ve also sourced a wholesale cat food supplier, organised an ongoing cat food supply to Fatima and have employed two young women: one to clean our new ‘Kitten City’ and to feed the kittens in the mornings, the other who orders and supplies the cat food to Fatima.