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I believe this phenomenon is similar in other Turkish cities as well. After moving abroad from Ankara, I can say lack of stray cats/dogs on streets was very noticeable.

I agree it doesn't have much to do with religion, IMO main two reasons are:

1) there doesn't seem to be any on-going effort to keep number of strays under control by the city.

2) many people feed strays as it's considered animal friendliness, often there will be at least one person in your neighbourhood who leaves food & water for animals.

You might think it's nice to see a cat or two in the streets, though it can get a bit crazy when you see 5-6 big and aggressive dogs appear in your street every day because someone feeds them, yet complaining about this would be considered heartless, and it's very likely the local government won't do anything about it either.

So, getting well fed and without any predators in a generally forgiving climate, strays easily get to survive and breed, and since neutering them all would be expensive and requires some level of organization from the state (which doesn't seem to happen) their numbers get to ever increase.

It's probably a cultural thing. Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, on the Caspian Sea, is culturally similar in some ways (religion obviously, but also beyond that; e.g. the language is similar) - and yes, there are tons of cats in that city. Or at least were, years ago when I visited.

There was this inner courtyard somewhere, baking in the sun, with a huge pile of what we thought were dead cats. Like a rugby melee type of thing, but just laying down motionless. I mean, it was so hot we could not imagine how those critters could just lay there not moving.

Then we noticed some of them were lazily moving their tails. They were not dead, they were sunbathing.

>though it can get a bit crazy when you see 5-6 big and aggressive dogs appear in your street every day because someone feeds them

Yeah, I got surrounded by a pack of 7 or 8 big dogs around dawn on the Golden Horn once. Was frantically swinging my backpack and screaming at them as they approached. After 30 seconds or so, a man noticed and threw some food to distract them so I could get away. They probably were just hoping I would feed them but it was still fucking terrifying. Felt like it activated some sort of primal fight-or-flight instinct passed down through millennia of humans being cornered by wolves.

Dealing with stray dogs isn't that difficult. They don't mess with you if they think you are more aggressive than them.

Also keeping the dogs in a neighbourhood well-fed is quite easy and cheap. That will rule out any aggressiveness.

I learnt this back when studying in my home country. As long as you bark back at them at a much louder voice, dogs will never attack you. But if you ever run away from them, they will chase behind you.

Learnt it the hard way when I interrupted a fornication session between three strays.

God staredowns with dogs is always terrifying. Especially when I gotta go somewhere. Now I'm in a position where if I continue to leave, the dog thinks I'm a pussy and chases me. But I can't stand there all day playing chicken!

Trust me, bark back at them in a voice louder than theirs and they will run away. Dogs are pack animals, so I think they fall for whoever is the more dominant one.

That is an epic experience that I'm sure you'll never forget! Love the way you wrote it too - especially the last sentence :)

> You might think it's nice to see a cat or two in the streets, though it can get a bit crazy when you see 5-6 big and aggressive dogs appear in your street every day because someone feeds them

You can't just reason about cats by arguing about dogs. You might as well say the same thing about squirrels and raccoons at that point. I for one would think it's nice to see a stray cat or two (or six) in the streets, but I wouldn't want to see a stray dog. They're just different animals.

Cats were brought to Europe from Egypt by Romans. They were domesticated in the regions around Istanbul for thousands of years before they were brought to the attention of the Greeks and Romans. Presumably, the Romans that brought the cats back to Europe saw their benefit to the populations on the other side of the Mediterranean and also adopted the culture of revering cats. The culture of revering cats predates the religion of Islam and is part of the culture that that religion was born out of, and is understandably celebrated.

What benefit does letting cats run feral have for settled humans? Rodent control. Even before they knew the public health benefits of that, they knew the benefits towards granary stores.

Now that cats aren't the only method available to control rodents, cities that don't have a cultural or cultural/religious reason to revere stray cats understandably don't and those that do, do.

Religion plays a role, culture plays a role, biology plays a role, history plays a role: everything plays a role (yes probably even the cuteness of cats).

Cats were domesticated in Egypt, not Turkey. And in Ancient times the areas around Istanbul were Greek.

Greeks that called themselves Romans for 2 millennia (200BC - 1800 A.D until the Hellenes name is back I think). Fascinating history.

The Roman (Rhomaion) identity was decoupled from the Latin language by the Early Byzantines.

The Byzantines never called themselves Byzantines, they called themselves Roman. Lots of places adopted Roman names with varying levels of legitimacy.

There were Greek speaking colonies around the Bosporus and in Egypt before the Romans got there.

Evolutionarily it seems cats didn't change that much and domestic and wild living cats are pretty similar. It's just that when humans became farmers rodents were attracted to the grain and the cats came and helped out with those. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2017/06/domesticated...

> I do not think religion plays a role at all. Greece is full of kitties too.

I came here just to say that: Athens is absolutely loaded with cats, especially strays. I think this is regional cultural, not religious.

Dogs too, though I think dogs have a harder time in cities.

The dogs do ok in Istanbul. Less so in a lot of other places though.

edit: the city of Istanbul has a program where they drive around and neuter and tag stray dogs. it seems to work pretty well. I used to be in istanbul every year and had the same dog friend that lived by my hotel. he was the best. miss him dearly.

With the exception of Loukanikos. The legendary hero dog. Everyone worshipped him haha.

Same thing with (at least) Dubrovnik in Croatia

Currently in Athens (well Pireaus). Can confirm. Italy used to be similar like 20 or 30 years ago but they got round to spaying / controlling things and now most cats are have owners and homes.

I noticed a lot of cats in the port of Jubail in Saudi Arabia. I was told they were scavengers and Arabs didn't usually keep them as pets, or think about them much at all.

My sons attends NYU's Abu Dhabi campus, and they have a population of feral resident cats on the campus.

I wonder if they end up taking part of the niche taken by strays and feral dogs, which are much less tolerated by Arabs. I'm in Canada, on the outskirts of a city, and we won't ever have much of a feral cat problem because we have a pretty stable coyote population. (I often feel sad when I see the missing pet posters for smallish mammals, especially in Winter.)

I’ve lived in a couple of Muslim countries, and religion is such an obvious explaining factor to me. Jakarta and KL have tons of stray cats. Bangkok and Manila don’t. Disturbing the business of a cat is strictly forbidden by Islam, and due to their religious significance, a lot of people will feed stray cats. Greece having stray cats too doesn’t make any of these factors less relevant.

I saw parts of Bangkok where people were feeding stray cats and had set up little donation boxes to that effect.

I haven’t seen a part of Jakarta that didn’t have stray cats, and I lived there for about 10 years.

Interestingly enough, it was not a Muslim dominated part of Bangkok (as opposed to where I was staying) but rather a Buddhist request for cat alms as I recall, I could be wrong.

There are temples in Thailand that care for stray cats, just the same as there are temples that care for stray dogs. But stray cats are far from ubiquitous in Bangkok, especially compared to the Muslim majority cities in the region.

Jakarta has so many stray cats that it's legitimately concerned they're going to bring rabies back to the city.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-03-19/inside-jakartas-battl...

During the Covid lockdowns, I saw numerous articles about how stray cats weren't getting fed properly in KL

https://www.nst.com.my/news/nation/2020/03/579036/abang-poli...

Every city has stray cats, it's just Muslim majority ones tend to have way more than you'd otherwise expect. Especially in developing countries that don't have sufficient animal control resourcing. Those cities also tend to focus their animal control efforts on getting dogs off the street, as Muslims are typically incredibly adverse to them (I saw 0 stray dogs in Jakarta the whole time I lived there, compared to Bangkok for instance where I couldn't walk to the end of my street without seeing at least 5 of them). If everybody all of a sudden decided they adored squirrels, and started carrying squirrel food around incase they ran into one, and started feeding all the squirrels that hung out around their home/place of work every day, you'd expect the squirrel population to explode too.

israel has both muslims and non-muslims and amounts of street cats are around the same for both areas

the big difference comes from socioeconomic state of the neighborhood i think

As I said above, just because something happens for one reason in one place doesn’t mean that same thing can’t happen for a different reason in a different place.

The reason Isreal has so many cats is because the British imported a lot of cats in the 30s, and just let them loose to control rat populations. The reason they’re still there is because animal sterilization is a very controversial topic in Judaism.

OK, just to set the record straight we have community cats in the US too. Disneyland has a couple hundred of them: https://disneylandcats.com/about/

(We are doing our part and have 2 at home.)

So is Rome.

One of my fondest memories of Rome, is visiting the Acattolico cemetery only to discover it's basically overrun by friendly cats. gothic monuments + cat sanctuary what a combo

It's the same at the Paris Montmartre cemetery.

There was a documentary years ago about the cats living in the Roman Forum. The alpha male they named Ceasar, and the younger upstart Brutus. The interactions and roles they observed between the female cats was quite interesting.

Edit: Found it - City of the Wildcats (narrated by David Attenborough)

True, same situation in Tel Aviv, I guess it is just an east Mediterranean thing, there are no stray dogs though like I have seen in Greece but that was many years ago.

Cats as street animal is just perfect, they are clean, they keep the rats at bay, you almost don't see any rats or mice in Tel Aviv comparing to places like NY. Also if you want a cat at home you can just pick one from the street.

Cat situation is the same, but the dog-loving culture of Tel Aviv is completely absent from nearly absent in all nearby cities – which seems to be exactly the religious or cultural difference. Religious not as jewish vs muslim, but as in secular modern vs religious: there seem to be no dogs in jewish cities outside the bubble as well.