Rescue Cats from Baghdad
They have survived stray bullets and car bombs. One successfully made it over the border from Iraq to Kuwait after narrowly being killed by an improvised explosive device, and others have escaped by flying straight out of Baghdad.
This is not an excerpt from James Bond and these are not war refugees bravely fleeing a battle-zone, they are stray cats that have been brought to safety from Baghdad to an unassuming semi-detached just outside of Birmingham.
The Cat Lady of Baghdad, otherwise known as Louise, has a passion for rescuing feral strays, domesticating them, and then rehoming them. Working as an admin clerk in Iraq, she spends all her money rescuing cats, which is a costly exercise at £3000-£5000.
However, Louise, aged 35, feels it is money well spent:
“In July 2005 I was working in Tikrit and Mona, my cleaning lady, turned up … [with] a half-dead kitten in a black bag. I … instantly loved him and nursed him back to health. In the October we were told we were moving to another camp and I couldn’t take him with me. So I decided I wanted to bring him home to England. Nobody wanted to help. I approached the Cat Protection League and they wouldn’t help me. I arranged with one of my local staff to take him to Basra in a taxi where he was met up with a friend of mine who took him over the border to Kuwait. He spent a month at the international vet clinic, was castrated, spayed and had his injections and a month later he flew back to the UK.”
Since then she has adopted litters of kittens and even a couple of dogs. As for the future she says:
“Now, I am not planning bringing home any more for myself, because I can’t put any more pressure on my parents. But I will help anyone else in the same boat as me. I will advise and assist with the mountains of paperwork etc. There are lots of people in Baghdad who would like to liberate their pets.”