Sharjah24 – AFP: At a cat sanctuary set in picturesque hills near Paphos, on the Mediterranean island of Cyprus, volunteers are grappling with a surge in abandonments they blame on the coronavirus pandemic.
"There has been an increase of about 30 percent of previously owned, loved (and) looked-after cats that have been left behind" as people depart the island, lamented Dawn Foote, 48, who runs the Tala Cats rescue centre.
Some among Cyprus's large expatriate and dual resident communities have retreated home as the economic squeeze has tightened, she noted.
"People, at the moment, have just got no money, and it's expensive to get a cat to another country -- you've got passports to pay for, you've got transport carriers to pay," Foote said.
"It's heartbreaking," she said, saying abandonments were rising island-wide, in part also due to locals no longer being able to afford pet food or vet bills.
Evidence of cats' domestication in Cyprus dates back further than anywhere else, including Pharaonic Egypt.
In 2004, archaeologists announced they had unearthed the remains of a cat and a human deliberately buried together 9,500 years ago at the Neolithic village of Shillourokambos.
That's some 1,500 years earlier than the previous record find -- also in Cyprus -- in the form of a feline jawbone.
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