cross-posted from: https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/20064636
brb moving to romania
You don’t see many cats out and about in Bucharest. Best move to Greece (or Turkey, I hear). In Athens the city microchips and makes sure “stray” cats and dogs get veterinary care. Public parks are filled with cats so you can’t eat your lunch without making a few friends, and you can’t park a motorcycle without a cat parking itself on the seat. Even the hill the Acropolis is on is covered in cats.
brb moving to athens
When i was in bulgaria there were also many cats and i made a friend there.
Eastern europe W
“owning”
Turkey seems low, but I guess public cats aren’t technically “owned”. :)
They belong to the king!
(The king of cats, not the other guy)
- “No, I don’t own any cats…”
- “But, there are 3 on your porch!”
- shrugs
Checks out. I have three cats, and one porch kitty.
I’m a little surprised Turkey came in at only 14%
No one owns them when it’s all over the streets I guess lol
I need to see their definition of cat ownership. I’m not (much of) an idiot, but my cats are smarter than me so I’d consider them the owners. They lay around all day and get treats whenever they want, after all. Only work they have to do is get snuggles when I want and eat bugs, which is something they seem to enjoy. I mean, if I could figure out how to get that kind of arrangement wouldn’t you?
Not the point of the graphic at all, but this is the second time recently I saw the spelling “Turkiye” and was wondering the context behind that change, wondering if it was anything like the change in the spelling of Kyiv (which has now been so engrained in my head that I had to go look up the Russian spelling “Kiev”).
I looked it up and it appears Türkiye has been their own spelling for over 100 years, and they just petitioned the UN to update the spelling of the country’s name in 2021.
Cool, so Türkiye it is! (Plus my phone automatically adds the umlaut, so that’s handy!)
Also in Türkiye they don’t own cats, the cats own them.
Yeah, the asked the international community not to call them after a water fowl anymore and use their native name for the country instead. Officially it always was “Republic of Türkiye” and not Turkey anyways.
The funny thing is the bird is called turkey after the country (despite being american), not the other way around.
Just a nitpick, Turkeys are ground birds, not water fowl.
Thanks for the correction. I honestly just assumed and didn’t think.
Erdogan changed it because he is a nationalist and took offense to the name of his country being compared to the bird. So now the country is on a PR campaign to get the international community on board with Türkiye, which is supposedly a more accurate phonetic rendering of the country’s name (if your language has the same phonetics as Turkish).
Personally, while I do think it’s a bit silly for countries to try to mandate what they are called in other languages (e.g. you don’t see Germany getting upset that not a single one of their neighbors save Austria calls them “Deutschland”), I know Turkey is not the first to do so and I generally respect attempts to “reclaim” identities (such as changing Kiev to Kyiv for Ukraine). But I think the umlaut is where I draw the line.
When I heard them announce Turkey during the opening ceremony of the Olympics, it sounded more like “Turkia” to me, so I don’t know why we don’t just use that, since my mind keeps reading Türkiye as “Toork-yay”.
Plus when I type Türkiye, my phone’s keyboard still auto-suggests the 🦃 emoji anyways so I’d say it was a lost battle from the start.
For the rest of my life… I’m going to use the emoji in place of the name of the country. Which lets be honest, even if I live another 60 years will only be like two times maybe.
The reason for its change was the names association with the animal, the gov didn’t like it. But like nobody from turkey actually cares, it’s just a formal thing. Funny thing: we call India Hindistan (which means land of the turkey).
Does it affect the spelling?
You’re supposed to read it in Turkish. It is “týɾ.ci.je” in phonetic but you’re better off googling its pronunciation.
Kinda interesting that Spain is surrounded by two countries with +30% cat ownership but themselves have 16%. Is there something about Spanish society that lowers cat ownership? I read a pet census (2017 tho) which seems to infer the percentage of cat lovers is even lower than this chart, with 8% of households (again 2017) having multiple cats per household creating an inflated 16% number. While Spaniards love dogs as much as anyone, interestingly birds are actually more popular than both cat or dog.
Man, anyone from Spain? I wanna hear the word on the street
They don’t need pets in Spain, they are already busy taking care of the emigrating British who all voted for Brexit.
I’d love to see an emigrated Brexit refugee per household map of Europe.
Anecdotal, but when I visited Madrid I saw more cats on the street than any other city I’ve visited. So maybe they get by with neighborhood cats?
I mean we love cats too. There are many stray cats but usually someone takes care of them in an altruistic way. For instance every time (and I mean every single time) I walk to uni I see the same woman feeding the same cats in the same place. Or in my town depending on the street, if you watch carefully you can see food bowls and water for cats.
Don’t know why ownership percentage is so low though. I’d say dogs are more popular, and birds probably for children.
I don’t know, but for Germany that seems way too high. Maybe I just don’t see all the indoor cats in the cities (where more than 75% of the people live).
Really? It seemed low to me?
But I’m a cat person and pay special attention when someone mentions their Katze.
Romanians go prrrr
Greece and Turkey heavily skewed because nobody owns the community cats
Our cats 🫡
Don’t know why the contrast between Portugal and Spain is so funny to me.
The only reason Portugal exists is because Spain was a dog centric society and they banished all the cat people to one corner of the peninsula thousands of years ago.
(This might be true, but that would be quite the coincidence since I just made it up)
So say we all.
Not a reddit fan anymore, but this makes me think of r/portugalcykablyat
Turkey is so low, becuse the cats own them not the other way around.
Yep, they reached the point where they acknowledge you can’t really “own” a cat.
It can go either way. There are some community cats in my neighborhood but also we have one feral rescue in our house who definitely knows our house is home. She goes out a couple times a day and rarely uses a litter box but she always comes right back in. Even if it’s a beautiful day and she stays outside longer, she stays right by the house.
What’s up with Romania?
Romania is easily explained with the fact that a lot of it is rural and basically everyone living in a village has a cat. There are also stray city cats that people feed that they might consider as theirs.
Turkey and Greece are a bit more surprising to me. I guess people don’t consider stray cats theirs even if they feed them.
You’re given a kitten at birth.
The lowest-numbered will have the most wild birds.
That sounds logical, but if you look at the map, there are countries with low ownership like Greece, Italy and Turkey, where there are loads of street cats everywhere. There are many cats there, just not so many owners. There can be less birds in countries with street cats compared to countries where cats are kept mainly indoors.
