Where I am,no… it’s very unusual.I’m in the centre of a major city, where most people live in apartment blocks, there is a lot of traffic, shops and offices.
You almost never see a cat here, never mind a stray cat!
According to official city statistics there are 30k wild cats living on the streets of Warsaw; volunteers take care of them, city council sponsors food and during winter they usually seek shelter in basements (edit: cats, not the city council), the city even used to send flyers for people to make their basements available for stray cats (source). Luckily no stray dogs whatsoever.
But truth be told it’s pretty unusual to see stray cats out in the open. I was really surprised we’ve got as many as 30k of them; I only checked that a second ago; can’t remember seeing even one this year and I walk a lot. My neighbourhood is ruled very firmly by squirrels, and there are gangs of them everywhere.
I’m not sure whether the ones I meet are stray or someone’s outdoor cats (there are exceptions who are certainly not strays), but they are fairly common and I always try to pet them whenever I see them.
Definitely not in the city. I’m not sure about the countryside – in my childhood freely roaming barn cats were common around my grandparents’ place, but the small cattle farms have virtually disappeared and I suspect that cats with them too. Whether they were truly strays is another thing..
I highly doubt the ones I see around here are strays. They are all looking well (or even slightly obese) with clear eyes and shiny fur, and for some I know where they live.
But my own cats are limited to the house and only go out on a leash. Partly because of the risks to the cats, but mostly because I don’t want them to hunt birds. We always have robins nesting in our hedges and oftentimes blackbirds and wrens too, all of which have that certain phase in their development where they leave the nest but stay on the ground a few days until they can actually fly longer distances.
In the cities no, they may walk around outside but simply are indoor/outdoor cats. They have an owner. Countryside is different tho, there are many ats that kinda were left to become feral
Yes, absolutely. Most people in the area where the cats hang, take care of them. I’ve always fed the strays wherever I’ve lived. And tbh, landlords are nightmares when it comes to pets, especially cats as they can scratch the furniture, so there is truly nothing better than taking care of an animal, when you can’t take one under your roof – it brings me such peace and joy.
My university even takes care of a few cats – we think of them as our university cats, but they roam freely everywhere in the area, so technically they are strays.
Sadly, not all people are kind to stray animals, but I’d say most of them care about strays (cats and dogs, though stray dogs are much more rare than cats) and some of them even become members of animal protection organizations.
Northern Bavaria: The cats I see on the street usually have a home and are not too far from it. Could be housecats, could be farm cats. Though a stray that tolerates humans might be indistinguishable from a cat with a home while some farm cats are halfway to feral.
Most cats I see in streets aren’t stray and do have a house. Their owners just let them enjoy the streets even if, since it’s the city center, most don’t.
I still see some stray but it’s rare (maybe they hide more?), you can see they are dirtier and skinny.
In Bucharest it’s very common. Maybe not in the center of the city, but there are a lot of them in residential neighborhoods. Some are friendlier than others. There are always a few of us that feed them, but of course this is not the same as having a home.
Not too much. In some village there tend to be the local cat man or lady that somehow take care of the dozen cats that roam around, but honestly overall I wouldn’t see much of them, in fact in busier city areas none at all.
Yes, it’s common to see them in Moscow, but they usually have an outdoor home of sorts: they live in a basement and patronize several shops or ladies with toxoplasmosis.
Yes, I am often woken up at night during the spring and summer by the sound of cats fighting on the garden shed rooves. If you walk around the neighbourhood in the evening, you will see cats everywhere. Even my own cat’s mother was a stray. If you just put a bowl with food in your garden, you will make a cat friend and a lot of people adopt cats that way.
I’m in Vilnius. They exist but are not common. There’s one around our house but she has an owner, so not really a stray. But she does spend most of the time outside. There are some actual strays but also there are people who feed them and build them little insulated houses to sleep in.
We do have a large variety of stray animals here, not a huge number of individuals, but a large variety. Cats and dogs, deer, elk, moose, hedgehogs, rabbits, foxes, there’s a cute little slaughter machine living nearby too, a marten. I shout at it when I see it run past, it stops and stares at me with its cute pointy ears, adorable murderer. They mostly feed on birds and rodents.
Vilnius has tons of green spaces, many large parks, outskirts of the city are surrounded by wild forests and there’s a lot of animals in all of them. I once met a ma-fucking-hoosive elk just 20 km from the central Cathedral square, on the outskirts of Vilnius.
I sometimes see a single one on the street like every few months and mostly at night. Not common at all in the city but it’s also too dangerous to let your cats run free. If you mean wild cats, then no.
No. You see owned indoors/outdoor cats, but strays are rare.
It is difficult for them to survive winter on their own, so that keeps the population of strays down.
And the strays that exist generally get trapped and taken care of by cat shelters. It is mostly kittens and juveniles because, again, winter.
All in all, animal shelters bring in around 10 000 stray cats every year, and they do take every cat they can find. So while the number can seem high, 10 000 is not a lot for a country the size of Finland.
I love cats so it would be kind of cool to have them roaming around everywhere, but at the same time those poor kitties wouldn’t have a good time in Finland’s winter. So bring then in and find them a good home.
It’s always awesome to go into countries like Turkey or Cyprus, where cats are everywhere but the people there take good care of them.
I’ve seen like 10 outside cats in Finland in my whole life, and i’m pretty sure all of them were just outside cats and not strays.
It’s extremely common; in fact, it would be weird for me to go out more than a couple of hundred meters and not see one. Usually they’re cared for by local shopkeepers or whoever is nearby.
With that being said, the stray population here for both cats and dogs is way less than it used to be.
In Ireland and England no, but it used to be fairly common back in the 50s or 60s. I’m in England currently and I’ve never seen any stray cats on the street. It seems to be more common in southern Europe to see street cats.
Tragically, yes. Many of them. The cat I adopted last October was a stray cat, he had been abandoned. And there are too many cases like this one in my country Portugal, which makes me utterly sick!
You can’t also really tell, which is a real stray and which’s just an outdoor cat, not all wear neck collars, as it’s not necessary, they’re all chipped (or at least should)
No. If you see a cat outside you’re safe to assume it has an owner.
Most cats you see outside are well fed, cared for and chipped. A scruffy looking cat will usually get picked up quickly and brought to a shelter where it is checked for a chip. If not chipped, they will be neutered and put up for adoption (that’s how we got ours)
Yeah, a lot of them, people take care of them – feed them, put up small cat houses on lawns, etc. It’s very common to see a cat sitting next to a small grocery shop, waiting for someone to come out with a pack of wet food to feed it!
I have two cats, and I picked both of them up off the street.
It’s quite rare, actually, most of the time it’s either freeroaming domestic cats, or in very rare instances – lost/escaped/abandoned pets – I see one maybe every year.
Yes. In Bucharest, it’s common, especially in areas with houses. Sometimes, it’s not even clear if they’re strays or live in a house but get fed by the whole neighbourhood.
Britain no, Austria no, Germany no. Other places I haven’t spent enough time in to say a definite no. Though Slovenia’s an almost certain no as I’ve seen lots of it and no stray cat populations.
Malta, they’re fn everywhere. And rather than capture, spay, vaccinate, tag and release (like many other places with stray problems), they just feed them instead. End result: a population of strays limited only by disease or starvation, and cat shit everywhere. But here’s the strange thing: they still seem to *buy* kittens. And as long as it’s young and cute, it’s “my kitten”, and then seemingly at some point it isn’t anymore.
I saw the same thing in parts of Ecuador: buy puppy, it’s *my* puppy, puppy becomes dog, not my dog and not my problem what it does. End result: gangs of strays roaming the street, aggressively hassling for food, barking at all hours of the day, dog shit everywhere.
I find it hard to wrap my head around, I have to say.
A lot of people here have outdoor cats, but strays of any kind are essentially non-existent. You won’t see dishevelled dogs or cats wandering around because they’re all in animal shelters or just taken in by people.
In Turkey there’re plenty of, but they don’t actually live a real “stray” life, bcs everybody’s taking care of them, like feeding, and also stuff like box-beds during winter time. Actually they’re more like “public pets”.
In parts of Serbia and Montenegro culturally similar to Turkey this is also very common thing. Many restaurants and cafes have regulars (cats) who will get fed, and hang out around there, sometimes inside lol
Here in the countryside it’s hard to tell if it’s a stray or just an outdoor/farm cat. True strays are rare, though. Most will be farm cats, but the occasional idiot doesn’t neuter their cats and once in a while there are strays born. But then the strays who survive often end up becoming someone’s farm cat. Judging by the chonky king of my in-laws farm, it’s not a bad life to be a reformed stray…
In Greece it is normal. Especially in larger cities or islands. And because many tourists from Northwest Europe are not used to seeing them, they sadly act as unofficial mascots on many islands. Instead of being removed from the streets as the invasive species they are, they are kept around taverns and archeological sites to lure tourists. Also there are crazy cat people that maintain feral cat colonies everywhere.
Yes in the wider city circle, but rarely downtown, due to the crowds. We have 5 big cats in our neighborhood. They sleep on all the warm cars, they get fed by everyone, and everyone who walks by stops to pet them (extremely friendly and trusting cats). We also built them a home underneath one of the bigger terraces so they can have a safe spot from the elements and an occasional stray dog.
Great thing is, we don’t have rodents or even cockroaches because of them. At one point, before those cats grew up, a year or two ago, we had a cat-free year in the neighborhood. That resulted in frequent mouse and rat appearance in the cellars, and cockroaches started showing up.
Croatia here. In cities that have cats/dogs shelters, it is unusual to see stray cat on streets. Usually, people take photos of wandering cats and send to shelters, then they publish on social media asking for the owner. They go and pick up the cat. If no one calls them and no chip/data is found, cat is officially available for adoptation.
There are few cats in each neighbourhood that are being taken care of by local residents.
We live in countryside close to a city. No stray cats. we all have our cats that are outside and roam through whole area but we all know which cat belongs to which house.
Turkey here: absolutely. We even take care of them. It’s also a good indicator of neighbourhood. If a neighbourhood’s cats seem afraid of humans and/or hide/run away when you walk towards them, it’s probably not a neighbourhood you’d like to live in.
Most cats you see outside are well-kept pets. If a cat looks clean and well-fed and doesn’t act panicked and desperate for human contact you can assume it has a home. But stray cats is still a problem and it’s usually left to private rescues to deal with.
No. Many years ago, sterilization and fostering programs began and it has been very noticeable.
Some may appear, but it is rare. Normally everyone I see looks like they belong to someone, they are clean and shiny, happy. And you can tell that the cat will go out or be let out through a window, and is taking his walk through “his domain”, when he gets fed up, he goes back home and goodbye.
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Depends where you live I think.
Where I am,no… it’s very unusual.I’m in the centre of a major city, where most people live in apartment blocks, there is a lot of traffic, shops and offices.
You almost never see a cat here, never mind a stray cat!
There’s a lot of outdoor cats here, so most cats that you’d see would just be pets. There’s a few strays but the majority of cats outside have homes
According to official city statistics there are 30k wild cats living on the streets of Warsaw; volunteers take care of them, city council sponsors food and during winter they usually seek shelter in basements (edit: cats, not the city council), the city even used to send flyers for people to make their basements available for stray cats (source). Luckily no stray dogs whatsoever.
But truth be told it’s pretty unusual to see stray cats out in the open. I was really surprised we’ve got as many as 30k of them; I only checked that a second ago; can’t remember seeing even one this year and I walk a lot. My neighbourhood is ruled very firmly by squirrels, and there are gangs of them everywhere.
Here in our village are a lot of cats. I know a few of them but not all, so …. how shall know if they are all pets or stray cats?
Highly depends on where in Denmark you live. But in Copenhagen I would say no. I ofthen see cats, but they tend to be very obviously not strays.
I’m not sure whether the ones I meet are stray or someone’s outdoor cats (there are exceptions who are certainly not strays), but they are fairly common and I always try to pet them whenever I see them.
Definitely not in the city. I’m not sure about the countryside – in my childhood freely roaming barn cats were common around my grandparents’ place, but the small cattle farms have virtually disappeared and I suspect that cats with them too. Whether they were truly strays is another thing..
I highly doubt the ones I see around here are strays. They are all looking well (or even slightly obese) with clear eyes and shiny fur, and for some I know where they live.
But my own cats are limited to the house and only go out on a leash. Partly because of the risks to the cats, but mostly because I don’t want them to hunt birds. We always have robins nesting in our hedges and oftentimes blackbirds and wrens too, all of which have that certain phase in their development where they leave the nest but stay on the ground a few days until they can actually fly longer distances.
In the cities no, they may walk around outside but simply are indoor/outdoor cats. They have an owner. Countryside is different tho, there are many ats that kinda were left to become feral
not unusual but not like they walk around everywhere.
when i see a cat outside i assume they are an outdoor cat but have an owner
Yes, absolutely. Most people in the area where the cats hang, take care of them. I’ve always fed the strays wherever I’ve lived. And tbh, landlords are nightmares when it comes to pets, especially cats as they can scratch the furniture, so there is truly nothing better than taking care of an animal, when you can’t take one under your roof – it brings me such peace and joy.
My university even takes care of a few cats – we think of them as our university cats, but they roam freely everywhere in the area, so technically they are strays.
Sadly, not all people are kind to stray animals, but I’d say most of them care about strays (cats and dogs, though stray dogs are much more rare than cats) and some of them even become members of animal protection organizations.
In Sweden no. You will see cats outside but that’s because it’s the norm to let your cats leave and enter as they please
Northern Bavaria: The cats I see on the street usually have a home and are not too far from it. Could be housecats, could be farm cats. Though a stray that tolerates humans might be indistinguishable from a cat with a home while some farm cats are halfway to feral.
How do you even know if a car is a Stray or just badly taken care of by his owners?
Also it could look perfectly healthy and be a stray…
To answer the question, here in Ireland where I live, I never saw a cat outside that I believed to be a stray.
I’m living in Madrid and I rarely see cats in the city centre but there are certain places where lots of them like to congregate a bit farther out
The average cat you will see in my country is not a stray, but a well-kept pet on their regular walk.
Stray colonies are quite rare.
Most cats I see in streets aren’t stray and do have a house. Their owners just let them enjoy the streets even if, since it’s the city center, most don’t.
I still see some stray but it’s rare (maybe they hide more?), you can see they are dirtier and skinny.
I see an average of under 1 cat per day in Vienna.
When I lived on the countryside I might see a few more but none are stray.
In Bucharest it’s very common. Maybe not in the center of the city, but there are a lot of them in residential neighborhoods. Some are friendlier than others. There are always a few of us that feed them, but of course this is not the same as having a home.
No. All cats that roam our neighborhood belong to someone.
When I was living in a nearby big city I would occasionally see cats that appeared to be strays, but here in this small town, there aren’t any.
Super abnormal.
The only place I’ve seen it is on the Norwegian countryside where some farmers let their (barn)cats reproduce like crazy, producing strays.
Unfortunately it is pretty common in Greece. Especially in the big cities like Athens or Thessaloniki, you can see stray cats and dogs everywhere.
I do see cats in the streets (UK) but they arent necessarily “stray”. They are usually someone’s pet that is exploring the area.
Not too much. In some village there tend to be the local cat man or lady that somehow take care of the dozen cats that roam around, but honestly overall I wouldn’t see much of them, in fact in busier city areas none at all.
Yes, it’s common to see them in Moscow, but they usually have an outdoor home of sorts: they live in a basement and patronize several shops or ladies with toxoplasmosis.
It’s normal to see cats out in the street. It’s not possible to tell by looking at a cat whether it is a stray or not.
Yes, I am often woken up at night during the spring and summer by the sound of cats fighting on the garden shed rooves. If you walk around the neighbourhood in the evening, you will see cats everywhere. Even my own cat’s mother was a stray. If you just put a bowl with food in your garden, you will make a cat friend and a lot of people adopt cats that way.
I’m in Vilnius. They exist but are not common. There’s one around our house but she has an owner, so not really a stray. But she does spend most of the time outside. There are some actual strays but also there are people who feed them and build them little insulated houses to sleep in.
We do have a large variety of stray animals here, not a huge number of individuals, but a large variety. Cats and dogs, deer, elk, moose, hedgehogs, rabbits, foxes, there’s a cute little slaughter machine living nearby too, a marten. I shout at it when I see it run past, it stops and stares at me with its cute pointy ears, adorable murderer. They mostly feed on birds and rodents.
Vilnius has tons of green spaces, many large parks, outskirts of the city are surrounded by wild forests and there’s a lot of animals in all of them. I once met a ma-fucking-hoosive elk just 20 km from the central Cathedral square, on the outskirts of Vilnius.
Germany
I sometimes see a single one on the street like every few months and mostly at night. Not common at all in the city but it’s also too dangerous to let your cats run free. If you mean wild cats, then no.
No. You see owned indoors/outdoor cats, but strays are rare.
It is difficult for them to survive winter on their own, so that keeps the population of strays down.
And the strays that exist generally get trapped and taken care of by cat shelters. It is mostly kittens and juveniles because, again, winter.
Cats are still pretty normal, although there are not nearly as much of them as say 20 years ago. Dogs, on the other hand, are not really common.
No It’s very rare.
All in all, animal shelters bring in around 10 000 stray cats every year, and they do take every cat they can find. So while the number can seem high, 10 000 is not a lot for a country the size of Finland.
I love cats so it would be kind of cool to have them roaming around everywhere, but at the same time those poor kitties wouldn’t have a good time in Finland’s winter. So bring then in and find them a good home.
It’s always awesome to go into countries like Turkey or Cyprus, where cats are everywhere but the people there take good care of them.
I’ve seen like 10 outside cats in Finland in my whole life, and i’m pretty sure all of them were just outside cats and not strays.
It’s relatively common to see cats wandering around the neighborhood, but they’re domesticated or farm cats.
Any stray would quickly “disappear” after doing his business in somebody’s garden one too many times.
It’s extremely common; in fact, it would be weird for me to go out more than a couple of hundred meters and not see one. Usually they’re cared for by local shopkeepers or whoever is nearby.
With that being said, the stray population here for both cats and dogs is way less than it used to be.
In Ireland and England no, but it used to be fairly common back in the 50s or 60s. I’m in England currently and I’ve never seen any stray cats on the street. It seems to be more common in southern Europe to see street cats.
Tragically, yes. Many of them. The cat I adopted last October was a stray cat, he had been abandoned. And there are too many cases like this one in my country Portugal, which makes me utterly sick!
You can’t also really tell, which is a real stray and which’s just an outdoor cat, not all wear neck collars, as it’s not necessary, they’re all chipped (or at least should)
No. If you see a cat outside you’re safe to assume it has an owner.
Most cats you see outside are well fed, cared for and chipped. A scruffy looking cat will usually get picked up quickly and brought to a shelter where it is checked for a chip. If not chipped, they will be neutered and put up for adoption (that’s how we got ours)
German village. Lots of cats here but no strays as far as I know. Just the local village cats that are pets.
Yeah, a lot of them, people take care of them – feed them, put up small cat houses on lawns, etc. It’s very common to see a cat sitting next to a small grocery shop, waiting for someone to come out with a pack of wet food to feed it!
I have two cats, and I picked both of them up off the street.
It’s quite rare, actually, most of the time it’s either freeroaming domestic cats, or in very rare instances – lost/escaped/abandoned pets – I see one maybe every year.
Yes. In Bucharest, it’s common, especially in areas with houses. Sometimes, it’s not even clear if they’re strays or live in a house but get fed by the whole neighbourhood.
Britain no, Austria no, Germany no. Other places I haven’t spent enough time in to say a definite no. Though Slovenia’s an almost certain no as I’ve seen lots of it and no stray cat populations.
Malta, they’re fn everywhere. And rather than capture, spay, vaccinate, tag and release (like many other places with stray problems), they just feed them instead. End result: a population of strays limited only by disease or starvation, and cat shit everywhere. But here’s the strange thing: they still seem to *buy* kittens. And as long as it’s young and cute, it’s “my kitten”, and then seemingly at some point it isn’t anymore.
I saw the same thing in parts of Ecuador: buy puppy, it’s *my* puppy, puppy becomes dog, not my dog and not my problem what it does. End result: gangs of strays roaming the street, aggressively hassling for food, barking at all hours of the day, dog shit everywhere.
I find it hard to wrap my head around, I have to say.
A lot of people here have outdoor cats, but strays of any kind are essentially non-existent. You won’t see dishevelled dogs or cats wandering around because they’re all in animal shelters or just taken in by people.
In Turkey there’re plenty of, but they don’t actually live a real “stray” life, bcs everybody’s taking care of them, like feeding, and also stuff like box-beds during winter time. Actually they’re more like “public pets”.
In parts of Serbia and Montenegro culturally similar to Turkey this is also very common thing. Many restaurants and cafes have regulars (cats) who will get fed, and hang out around there, sometimes inside lol
Here in the countryside it’s hard to tell if it’s a stray or just an outdoor/farm cat. True strays are rare, though. Most will be farm cats, but the occasional idiot doesn’t neuter their cats and once in a while there are strays born. But then the strays who survive often end up becoming someone’s farm cat. Judging by the chonky king of my in-laws farm, it’s not a bad life to be a reformed stray…
It’s normal (as in people don’t go “oh my god, a cat! This is not normal!”), but it’s uncommon to see generally any stray animals in cities.
Edit: now that I think about it, I’ve seen more wild boars and hares than stray cats
Yes, but they are well fed because people leave food for them. I adopted a neighbourhood stray cat, it came in my yard and never left. It’s mine now.
Lol no they’d die of the cold. There would be a social media campaign to capture and rescue the cat if a single one was spotted. Finland.
In Greece it is normal. Especially in larger cities or islands. And because many tourists from Northwest Europe are not used to seeing them, they sadly act as unofficial mascots on many islands. Instead of being removed from the streets as the invasive species they are, they are kept around taverns and archeological sites to lure tourists. Also there are crazy cat people that maintain feral cat colonies everywhere.
Yes in the wider city circle, but rarely downtown, due to the crowds. We have 5 big cats in our neighborhood. They sleep on all the warm cars, they get fed by everyone, and everyone who walks by stops to pet them (extremely friendly and trusting cats). We also built them a home underneath one of the bigger terraces so they can have a safe spot from the elements and an occasional stray dog.
Great thing is, we don’t have rodents or even cockroaches because of them. At one point, before those cats grew up, a year or two ago, we had a cat-free year in the neighborhood. That resulted in frequent mouse and rat appearance in the cellars, and cockroaches started showing up.
Croatia here. In cities that have cats/dogs shelters, it is unusual to see stray cat on streets. Usually, people take photos of wandering cats and send to shelters, then they publish on social media asking for the owner. They go and pick up the cat. If no one calls them and no chip/data is found, cat is officially available for adoptation.
There are few cats in each neighbourhood that are being taken care of by local residents.
We live in countryside close to a city. No stray cats. we all have our cats that are outside and roam through whole area but we all know which cat belongs to which house.
Turkey here: absolutely. We even take care of them. It’s also a good indicator of neighbourhood. If a neighbourhood’s cats seem afraid of humans and/or hide/run away when you walk towards them, it’s probably not a neighbourhood you’d like to live in.
Most cats you see outside are well-kept pets. If a cat looks clean and well-fed and doesn’t act panicked and desperate for human contact you can assume it has a home. But stray cats is still a problem and it’s usually left to private rescues to deal with.
No. Many years ago, sterilization and fostering programs began and it has been very noticeable.
Some may appear, but it is rare. Normally everyone I see looks like they belong to someone, they are clean and shiny, happy. And you can tell that the cat will go out or be let out through a window, and is taking his walk through “his domain”, when he gets fed up, he goes back home and goodbye.