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Zimbabwean pets

Posted by on December 3, 2011

Sunday was a very lazy day. It was raining on and off throughout the day which made me feel like staying indoors. I did a lot of reading and even took a short nap in the afternoon, otherwise not much to report.

My next door neighbor (and landlord), Veronique (she’s half French) or Vee for short, has been in South Africa this past week visiting her brother. Vee has two cats, the first ones I’ve seen here. One is quite shy and I haven’t really seen him, but the other, Toby, is quite bold. This past week he’s been coming into my apartment whenever I’m home. Since it’s been hot I’ve been leaving the door open, with the gate locked and Toby can just come in through the bars. But he’s been so desperate for attention that a few times he has climbed in through the kitchen window when the door has been shut! He’s a nice cat and likes to be petted and to sit on laps. Vee says he bites sometimes but we’ve come to an understanding and he hasn’t nipped me yet.

I haven’t seen many cats here but there are a lot of dogs. When I go running in the mornings, I see several people walking their dogs, mostly larger ones, the size of labs or bigger, but a few smaller ones as well.

There are a number of veterinary shops around and in every grocery store there’s half an aisle of pet food. There’s even a frozen pet food section! I guess Coal is not the only one who gets hot breakfast!

This is quite different from Zanzibar where there were no cats at all and few dogs. And the dogs that I saw were very skinny and looked to survive on scraps. Here, animals are well taken care of although I think it’s still hard for them with wild animals and whatnot.

I could tell the moment Vee got back this evening: Toby was sitting near my feet while I watched a movie on my computer and suddenly he was off like a shot and I didn’t see him again all night. Even though I was good company for him, he still knows where he gets his food from!

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