Pakadora - Portuguese Cats

These are phrases Gabi hears daily. From when the moment her phone is turned on to when she finally closes it at night. Because she wants to help, her mind circles, thinking of the cats that she’s been asked to help, what will happen to them if she says no? Her emotions and compassion create internal angst, but by the morning, she’s usually decided she will help, and sets off with a plan, another, on top of all the mountain of plans she’s already becoming overwhelmed with.

 

When plans go wrong, rescue can bring real danger, and more stress.  Recently, during a rescue mission, Gabi was stranded on the motorway for several hours, late into the night, in driving rain and cold, on a perilous stretch of road. Her phone battery dying, no ambient light and her little car, already battered by rescue, finally broken, battery dead. Gabi felt alone, and as attempts to assist her failed until eventually the GNR were able to locate and rescue her, her resilience began to crack.

 

While the ‘normal’ labour of early morning trapping and late-night vet runs are relentless, they are only part of the unseen workload. Ongoing bureaucracy, non-stop social media to maintain Pakadora’s visibility, vital attention to fundraising, and often giving one-to-one care for up to 20 cats in her own home, takes its toll. Add to that the feeling of a deep personal responsibility, through a fierce desire to help cats (and humans that genuinely cannot cope), and it becomes a 24/7 pressure.

 

Gabi’s situation is not unique to the Algarve or to Portugal. Globally, hundreds and thousands of associations, charities and organisations face the same challenges, and, if counted, these rescuer-labourers, would probably reach millions. Human individuals providing some form of assistance to animals, form part of the invisible ‘informal’ economies: unpaid, unmeasured [1] , and undervalued, yet considered essential [1]. A 2025 article estimates women globally spend “16 billion hours of unpaid care work” [2] and that is only counting caring for human individuals. Trying to find a global figure for the invisible hours spent on animal-care is frustratingly difficult, as it’s not systematically tracked. Where numbers do exist, similar patterns show - women carry much of the burden. There is a gendered load of invisible domestic ‘livestock’ care [3] [4]. For example, the FAO reports, of the “600 million poor livestock keepers in the world”, around two-thirds are women”[2] [5]. Herzog [6] notes animal rescue follows the same gendered trend, where rescue-labour falls mostly on women, however, is mainly unmeasured, untracked and societally undervalued.

 

Gabi, the face of Pakadora, is one of the millions of women who silently care for societies animals when they become ‘stray’. A 2024 study, the first census of ‘stray’ animals by DBio/CESAM [7] reported that Continental Portugal has “over 930 thousand animals without homes, of which 830,541 are cats and 101,015 are dogs.”.

 

These figures may make you think, this situation needs to be ‘managed or ‘controlled’ but first there’s a framing question to be unpacked: are cats and dogs commodities, companions or members of our communities? Individuals are often homogeneously lumped together as statistics and hence reduced to a label, for example ‘feral’, ‘stray’, ‘abandoned’, ‘homeless’, ‘pest’, and each of these labels wields a stigma, which affects how the animal will be treated.

 

Furthermore, many animals move back and forth between categories of commodity or companion and as such, can bear several labels over a lifetime. For example, one day a companion, then abandoned or lost, he or she becomes a stray. Others, born without human consent, and therefore outside human control, are quickly defined as feral, a term that wields the stigma of being ‘uncivilised’ [8]. When cats and dogs lose their companion status, they slip into a liminal or ‘in between’ state where they lose protection, considered ‘out of place’ [9] and recast as a ‘problem’ to be managed.

 

This is where people assume rescue comes in. However, rescuers, often small, overstretched operations, often work first and foremost as an animal-centred service. They provide those they rescue with care, love, safety and the chance to recover and thrive. Conversely, some members of the public, see rescue operations as a human-centred service - a place to offload ‘unwanted’ animals, deal with NIMBY-ism [10], or seen as a safety net to absorb the consequences of people who take on too many animals, or can’t or won’t sterilise. 

 

These expectations can emotionally clash. When rescues say “not right now,” or ask for shared responsibility, frustration can flare. The script is familiar: “I can’t personally do anything”; “I want you to take ‘it’”; “I don’t have the time/space/money”. Solutions are often given, and sometimes people follow the options they are given. However, often the conversation turns reactive, into guilt-weaponised pressure: “If you don’t take the cat/dog I’ll abandon them/euthanise them” or some other guilt-trip choice is fired.

 

As mentioned, rescue labour is predominantly female, and as such, women carry much of this guilt burden on top of the physical, mental and financial load. The constant moral weight of “what happens to the animal if I say no?” begins to wear.  A 2024 Australian study summarised here by PetRescue [11] highlights the toll rescue work can take on human health. The “cost of caring” has a name: Compassion Fatigue[12]: a form of burnout that can grow from the constant pressure of witnessing suffering and bearing responsibility.

 

While that backdrop is important ans the focus of this blog: the systems, pressures, the labels are still not the whole story, because it risks turning living beings into abstract problems and remaining human-centered. If we want things to change we need to make space for the lived reality of animals behind the statistics which is my personal focus of interest. Why? Because the suffering they endure mentally, physically, and socially is rarely spoken of in ways that are collated and reported on to be taken seriously enough the shape policy for them and those with their well-being in mind.  Policy matters: it determines the lives of the animals we have domesticated [13] and then left ‘in between’, unprotected, and without care. Let’s change the story. Rather treating cats and dogs as commodities [14] or ‘just’ (disposable) companions [15], let’s recognise them as members of our communities, and include them when forming community support and infrastructure, to ensure they allowed to truly thrive as members of our multi-species communities.

 

I could continue, but I’ll stop here and leave you with the words of Gabi and a photo of Tootsie, a cat whose life has been reshaped by Pakadora’s collective intervention.

 

Words from Gabi.

 

“Today I am broken. People have broken me. Financial, emotional, mental and physical pressure has become enormous.

 

We cannot continue as we are.

 

Cats are not designer handbags and we are not service providers paid to service human demands.

 

So many situations can be solved with simple steps, yet we constantly meet the same resistance of ‘it’s not my problem’ or worse, threats of animal abandonment if we do not take on the responsibility of care.

 

We are not in charge of animal welfare policy, nor are we able to affect widespread change. We can only do what we can do and some cats are going to miss out because we cannot take them under our umbrella.

 

These cats and dogs are community animals and the community must change their attitude. All nationalities, all professions, all institutions, every person must share responsibility.

 

We need to rethink what out community looks like and how we can reshape them to care for cats and dogs, who have lived among our species for over 9,000 years[16]. We have to work collectively to achieve this. “

 

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