GambiCats first neutering visit ~ May 1998

The hotel cats were beautiful, lithe creatures, often white with small tabby and black markings, always in evidence at meal times. At some hotels, they waited patiently. At others, they jumped onto the tables! The females seemed to be permanently pregnant and the males showed the usual wounds and ragged ears that go with the 'top cat' approach to life. My husband Peter and I have spent many happy holidays in  The Gambia, a tiny West African country popular with British holiday makers because of its reliable winter sun and its  long-standing links with the UK. But as the years went by we became more and more aware of the hotel cats...

During our holiday in 1997 we asked the manager of the Fajara Hotel, where we were staying, if any neutering programme was being tried. His reply, which others confirmed, was that when there were thought to be too many cats they were caught in nets and either given lethal doses of strychnine or trucked off into the bush and left there. This decided us - we had to try and start a neutering programme.

The manager thought there was a good chance of support from other hotels, and raised the question at a meeting of the hotel managers. He came back with the traditional Gambian reply: "No problem". He would arrange free accommodation for our GambiCats' team if we organised everything else. He was happy for us to try a pilot project at the Fajara and the neighbouring Kombo Beach hotel and see how it went. (It helped that he was, unusually for a hotel manager, mad about cats!).

This support, together with the knowledge that Dodou Bojang, a Gambian friend who had worked for several years as a Government Livestock assistant, was very interested in helping, made us decide to try and raise the resources when we returned to the UK.

During the next weeks we sent our Project Proposal to numerous potential sponsors. We needed to take everything with us - even newspapers are in short supply in The Gambia where printed news from home is worth a beer at the local beach bar! We had to take traps, drugs, cages for pre- and post-operative care, a pressure cooker to sterilise surgical instruments, bathroom scales to weigh the cats to calculate the dose of anaesthetic, and so on. 

Offers of help started to come together with valuable advice from others with experience of cat neutering programmes in Greece and Spain. A vet, Lisette Cartier van Dissel, whose previous experience on a neutering project in Greece had not dampened her enthusiasm, volunteered her services for a week. We also made contact with Dr Jenny Remfry, a cat welfare consultant who had tried (unsuccessfully) to set up a similar scheme some years ago in co-operation with vets from the Gambian Department of Livestock Services. She was going back for a holiday and agreed to help us.

Gradually things came together, and after some funding and offers of help in kind began to arrive we booked the flights (even though our bank account was in the red!). Our home was full of cages and resembled a zoo without the animals! 
Packing everything securely was vital as it was unlikely that broken items could be mended or replaced once in The Gambia. We obtained government permission for Lisette to perform the operations, together with approval to bring in the equipment and drugs needed without payment of import duties. 
On the day we finally booked the air tickets there was a last-minute hitch. We heard that the Fajara Hotel, where Lisette, Peter and I had been promised free accommodation, was not using its generator during the day as there were so few guests. With no possibility of sterilising instruments with the pressure cooker, or keeping drugs cool, we decided that Lisette should go to the Kombo Beach where Jenny was staying. The management generously offered her free accommodation, as well as two rooms with en-suite bathrooms in a block due for refurbishment to use for the operations and as a recovery area.

On departure we all met up at Gatwick early in the morning to weigh in our excess baggage (about 80kg) which Monarch Airlines generously allowed us to take without charge as their contribution to the project. We had packed out clothes inside the cages to maximise space! At Banjul airport our transport was waiting organised by Dodou. Willing helpers loaded all the cages and equipment into a rented Land Rover and we arrived at our hotels in late afternoon in blazing sunshine.

That evening and the next day we set up the operations room and talked to local hotel staff to find out how many cats there might be and where they were most likely to be found.