The Cats Of Venice

The beautiful city of Venice has a unique army of guardian cats -despite the animal's reputation for not liking the water. Take them away and the city of the Doges would face a new danger: that of being gnawed away by rats as well as crumbling into the sea.

Just, the smell of cats is enough to frighten off the menace whose very name evokes hideous medieval images of the plague. If the cats were to disappear the rats would take over. Of course, some people do not like the smell of cat in the ruelles between the houses either -these are the same people who, when the good weather comes, complain of the noise the tomcats make.

But it is a price that has to be paid. Everyone recognises that in the fight against rodents the cat is our greatest ally. Cats have had the best of times and the worst of times in the city of Venice. During the Inquisition, in Venice as elsewhere in Europe, the cat was not spared. The Inquisitors, who saw witchcraft everywhere, accused the mysterious creature of being in league with the Devil.

Unjustly exterminated, by the time the crusaders had brought the Black Death back from the east, the cat was practically wiped out. In the people's distress, as rats spread disease, the cats usefulness was proved. The citizens could see how essential they were to a city like Venice, where the little channels between walls and houses harboured rats and allowed them to multiply.

After this a typically Venetian breed of cat developed the result of crosses between the imported eastern cats and those native cats that still survived. Impressive, with its eyes the green of the lagoon, irresistibly reminding one of the wild cat, the Soriano -so called after the Syrian cat -has been the pride of the Venetians ever since, and they owe it an everlasting debt of gratitude.

For many people today the city and its cats are synonymous. Venice has its famous cats and its unknown cats, past and present. There are street cats and palace cats, and tourists come to see them as they come to see the gondolas, canals and glassworks. Today, 12,000 cats still look after the city of the Doges, which only has 80,000 inhabitants.

A society has been set up to protect, feed and vaccinate the cats and control their numbers by neutering. The city is currently working on providing a refuge for them -after so many years they have certainly earned it. It was decided to fetch whole boatloads of cats from the east, where they had the reputation of being particularly savage hunters. The cats were released into the streets and the rats took refuge in the canals, which marked the beginning of the end of the plague.