Any visit to the medina of Rabat will reveal to you a world of constant activity. You’ll find vendors selling street food, fruit, spices, djellabas, streetwear, shoes, electronics, teapots, art, and just about all the other things you could want when visiting Morocco. There are homes and hotels all over the medina, and restaurants for when you get hungry. But even with all the people who live in Rabat medina, there are yet more inhabitants that we don’t usually think about: the cats. Trust me, they are everywhere, and not just in the medina. Cats are all over Rabat and the other cities of Morocco. After the cats were mentioned briefly at the pre-departure orientation, I had a preconceived idea in my mind that the cats were just considered by Moroccans to be a nuisance like stray animals here in the US, but I was delightfully surprised to find that this is not the case.

The key difference between the treatments of strays in America versus Morocco is that in America they are seen as belonging to nobody, while the street cats here in Morocco are seen as belonging to everybody. There’s one cat in particular who I usually see on the way to class in the morning, an orange kitty who’s always hanging around outside the hanout. She has a little cardboard box with a bed inside which sits there on the sidewalk under the overhang of the building, and the mul hanout feeds her each day; I’ve seen people passing by give her scraps too. Moroccans often collect the leftover food from their meals, and instead of throwing it out or saving it for later, they put it outside for the animals on the street. Taking care of Moroccan cats is a collective endeavor, which I think could never happen in the US because we are (for some reason) so averse to collective responsibility and altruistic cooperation. The longer I’m here, the more I like the Moroccan way, since it helps to ensure that these beautiful creatures don’t go hungry, and overall I think that the street cats here are much better cared for than those in the US. Still, I’m a little sad that these cats don’t have warm homes and humans to bond with.

Most of my friends know that I love cats, so resisting the urge to pet every one I see here in Morocco has been a real struggle. The cat that lives by the hanout has a couple scars on her head, but is in otherwise good shape. Many of the cats here have at least some small wounds, which is indicative of a lack of veterinary care for them – no surprise, since they live in the streets, but still it’s saddening to see. I would feel guilty if my pets had untreated injuries, so I wonder if Moroccans feel the same about their neighborhood animals. We know of the bystander effect: unfortunately, sometimes things that are everyone’s responsibility end up not being taken care of at all, since each person thinks everyone else will take care of it. I’m not sure whether the bystander effect is actually a factor here, but at the very least there certainly is the potential for the communal method of caring for the cats to fail in this respect. I worry how many cats in Rabat are in awful condition and we just don’t see them.

In my opinion, the way Moroccans take care of their street cats as communities is a reflection of their hospitable culture towards guests. There seems to be a notion that since the cats are there, they have to be provided for – I interpret the collection of leftovers for the animals as symbolic of Moroccans’ respect for them. It gives me the impression that the animals are treated as neighbors, which is a little bit like the idea in the US that pets are members of the family. Similarly, when you are a guest in a Moroccan home, no expense is spared to ensure you have comfortable accommodations, plenty of food, and so forth. This is an extension of the Moroccan sense of community, in which neighbors just take care of each other; I feel like this isn’t usually the case in the United States. I also enjoy that the Moroccan sense of community gives a sense of belonging and collective duty to your neighbors – in the US, people tend to be too individualistic for that atmosphere to exist. However, my time here has showed me how important it is to work together as a community to care for each other, and the positive effects it can have for everyone involved.

Even the way that strays are perceived in each culture reveals something about the way Americans and Moroccans think differently. Americans often see stray animals as a problem which needs to be dealt with: the animals are considered a nuisance to the community and are collected either to be put in a shelter or euthanized. On the other hand, Moroccans see the cats as part of their neighborhoods, and as a result there isn’t really an issue to be dealt with, but the cats are taken care of to some extent. Ultimately, I can’t really see either method as perfect. It just doesn’t sit right with me to think of these animals as problems to the community; after all, they’re living beings, and I think that regarding the population of homeless animals this way fails to respect that status. I concede that it is nice to consider the potential for animals in shelters to find homes and loving humans, and animals in shelters can be spayed and neutered to avoid creating more homeless animals. But this doesn’t always happen, and the sad alternative is euthanasia because we can’t (or won’t) provide for the animals as a community. In this regard, the Moroccan way makes a lot of sense to me, since the cats are in general provided for with regard to food and shelter. But then again, the lack of veterinary care is a concern for Moroccan street cats.

I won’t pretend to know what the best way is to take care of the strays of Morocco and the US. But I do think that Moroccans’ sense of community and the benefits it brings to the care of their street cats is commendable, and I want to emulate that sense of community myself. I think that we don’t take enough care of each other in the US – certainly I’m no exception – and I’m committing now to being a better and more attentive friend and neighbor in my community at home.