Things are bad with homeless cats in Georgia. Almost all of them are scared and hungry. There is no program for them, they are simply not touched, believing that if cats are sterilized, then rats will breed in the city. Therefore, they are left to survive as it will.
Now the attitude towards them is improving, but this process is slow. Locals and visitors have begun to feed the cats, but so far most look depressing.
Nevertheless, there are people who pick up stray kittens and, after processing, try to attach them through social networks.
As for cats as pets, everything is fine here. This can be judged even by the number of pet stores – there are a lot of them.
Therefore, once in Georgia, you can easily buy cat food, feed and drink it.
After living in Turkey for 6 months and moving to Batumi shortly after, I can confidently say that Georgians treatment of animals is downright appalling. The majority of Turkish people adore cats and the community builds shelters for them and feeds them all the scraps. Every restaurant in Turkey feeds cats and dogs every day.
In Georgia it’s the exact opposite. Restaurant owners prefer to waste the food, rather than help the starving cats. Cats are domesticated, even when “feral.” That means they cannot survive comfortably without the aid of humans. It is the instinct of cats to hunt smaller animals and feeding them won’t cause them to stop eating rats. I watched a colony of cats struggling from my apartment for 3 months and only one person bothered putting out a minuscule amount of food, once or twice a week. My attempts to help them were met with icy glares, what kind of person gets angry at another one for helping hungry animals?
Cats limping, cats falling off rooftops and breaking their legs, suffering kittens, none of this catches the attention of the average Georgian who simply can’t be bothered.
Starving kittens crying all day goes entirely unnoticed here. I’ve seen enough of this to say confidently that Georgians don’t care about cats and for the most part they don’t care too much about dogs either, especially in Kutaisi where I saw dogs walking around with open sores, starving to death in the town center. If this is an “improvement” then I shudder to think of what things were like before.
I know there are good people here in Georgia but it seems there are far more unpleasant ones; and I might come across as rude, but sometimes the truth is hard to hear.