Meet Dubai’s cancer survivor-cum-cat lady
dubai — Amitha Menezes may only have two biological children of her own, but if you ask her how many “children” she really has, she’d tell you between 25 to 30.
That’s because this animal loving Indian expat goes out every evening, without fail, feeding the street cats near her home in Dubai; cats that she calls her “babies”. “I have re-homed maybe 20 to 25 cats in the last four years. I foster them out too, but I often end up keeping some of them as well. I just love animals. They are my passion.”
At present, Amitha shares her family apartment in Satwa with three cats and one British bulldog — all of which were rescued, and two of which have very significant names. “One cat is called KFC because my son found him, neardeath, outside a KFC restaurant here. The other is called Lucky because he was a litter of three kittens and was the only one who survived. When his siblings died, it broke my heart in two.”
But there has been times when “cats have outnumbered humans” in her apartment. Each week, Amitha spends about Dh150 on two 7kg bags of cat food — each bag lasting just three to four days each.
With five cats situated on her work compound in Satwa, three at Jafiliya Metro station and the rest scattered around the streets, she laughed saying “everywhere you look in my house there is cat food”.
“Even the car is full of it. It smells
Basically, I feel like human beings can ask for food and pay for food, but what about these animals? Some humans are so cruel to them and they are just helpless. It gives me so much pain to see it.” Amitha Menezes
like cat food everywhere. Every time I see a cat, I make my husband stop the car and feed it. I can’t stop it, there’s just something that compels me to do it,” she said.
But even a colon cancer diagnosis on July 17, 2016, wasn’t going to get in the way of her caring for these abandoned animals. “When I became sick, I went back home to India for treatment but I requested someone to feed my cats. After six months, when I returned, the cats heard my sound and they became crazy. It warmed my heart.”
Even her 18-year-old daughter can vouch for just how much love she has for the helpless street cats. “When she talks about the cats she gets so, so happy. She doesn’t get as happy as that when she talks about me and my brother,” she joked.
If it was up to Amitha, she said she would have them all live with her. But it’s not possible in a twobed apartment, so for now she will continue doing her best to feed and re-home them all.
“Basically, I feel like human beings can ask for food and pay for food, but what about these animals? Some humans are so cruel to them and they are just helpless. It gives me so much pain to see it.”
Although Amitha said she’s always been an animal lover, her mission to save the street cats of Dubai started about four years ago. “When I was in college in India as a teen, I would often bring animals home and get into trouble. Now, people in my area call me the ‘cat lady’, but I like it.”
In the beginning, she said her husband couldn’t quite understand her need to go out every day caring for the cats, but now, he loves them just as much as her. “I used to hide cats in my house away from him, but now my whole family treats them as their own. All our clothes are full of fur and they eat and sleep with us too.”
But more than just feed and water the cats, Amitha spends money from her own pocket treating them with trap-neuter-return (TNR) injections. Because some of the cats she cares for have never been owned or have been lost for so long that have become feral and cannot live as pets anymore.
Since it is hard to adopt them out, by neutering them she at least knows they won’t be able to breed and add to an already out-of-control problem. With each pregnancy spay costing Dh330 (thanks to a 50 per cent discount from a Facebook community called the ‘Bin Kitty Collective’), Amitha usually treats about one cat per week with a TNR injection.
When asked how much she has spent on helping these cats over the years, her daughter said without doubt it was “well into the tens of thousands of dirhams”. But the now cancer-free Amitha said it’s not about the money. “If I won the lottery, I wouldn’t buy a nice car or house, I would build a shelter for all Dubai’s abandoned animals.”
kelly@khaleejtimes.com