ANIMAL care is included among the 'exceptions' for which people in Spain are allowed to leave their homes – which also covers feeding and attending to feral cat colonies, since these are regarded under national law as 'domestic pets'. Most local councils, animal shelters, or both, now run schemes for volunteers to feed the ferals – and also 'trap-neuter-return' programmes for sterilising street cats – and are now issuing cards to them so they can show the police they are authorised to be out for reasons other than shopping or medical issues.
In towns where alley-cat care is 'organised', the animals are 'coaxed' into a specific area used as a permanent feeding station, with shelter, outside space, and well-fenced in to keep them off the busy roads.
But in towns which do not yet have such facilities in place, cat colonies are now finding the world is their oyster – sadly for them, not in the fishy sense – and they are now able to stroll around at ease where cars and people used to be.
Anecdotal evidence has shown that wildlife is becoming more of a presence in urban areas now that humans and vehicles are mostly absent – and in many areas, residents have noticed there are more birds around than usual.
Whilst in the UK, people who like to encourage and care for the birds can buy properly-tailored food for them from almost every supermarket – dried meal-worms and grains tailored to the specific needs of 'garden birds' – this is not the case in Spain, and ornithologists have urged the public not to feed them.
Environmental charity SEO/BirdLife says food left out for the birds by the general public is 'rarely nutritionally appropriate' for them, and if they fill up on the usual dried bread, crisps and other offerings, they will then not eat food which is more suitable for them, suffering poor health as a consequence.
SEO/BirdLife says nature, in spring, provides what birds need, and assures caring residents that they will be fine.
Some cities even fit pigeon-food dispensers in places where their droppings would not cause a mess – Barcelona is one of these, and has also, at times when the pigeon population is multiplying out of control, been lacing these meal supplies with contraceptives that are harmless to the birds' health but prevent them from constantly reproducing.
Cats and birds – although the two normally don't mix – are not, however, the only species which have been appearing in areas where humans are normally the dominant species, according to both official reports and video and photographic footage by members of the public.
Wild boar
A mountain species mainly, wild boar often head down to terra firma during times of drought when vegetation at their habitual altitude is sparse and they are short of food – this means they not only cause havoc to farm crops, but also private gardens, since they are frequently seen on mountain urbanisations. An even greater concern is when they stray into the roads – given their typically-rural habitat, the highways they wander onto are usually unlit, and a car colliding with a wild boar can cause serious injury, or worse, to drivers and passengers, as well as the animals.
Lately, wild boar culling has started to attract rejection from the public, especially younger generations of adults, and some rural authorities are taking to maintaining vegetation on uninhabited mountains and lacing food with contraceptives to keep the population under control and ensure they have no need to go beyond their natural stamping ground to survive.
Despite their wanderlust in search of sustenance, finding one strolling down a city-centre street is somewhat unusual.
As well as several having been seen in Madrid's northern suburb of Las Tablas and in satellite towns north of the metropolitan area like Las Rozas, Alcobendas and San Sebastián de los Reyes, one was spotted recently in the Rodríguez Sahagún Park between the Pilar and Tetuán neighbourhoods.
One Twitter user even filmed a wild boar wandering along a main road right in the heart of Madrid city, completely untroubled by cars.
Another was filmed by a Twitter user strolling down the middle of the C/ Balmes in the very centre of Barcelona – a street which is a dual carriageway and is normally chock-full with cars at every hour of the day
and night.
Several have been spotted in the grounds of Madrid's Complutense University, too.
Goats
The sight of farmers herding their goats across the fields – sometimes, on country lanes, forcing cars to slow down and wait for them to pass – is quite common in rural Spain, even close to built-up coastal areas. Goat's milk and cheese is a staple in most supermarkets, and the latter frequently found on salads and pizzas in restaurants, and even pizzas in the deep-freeze at your local store.
It is less common to see them loitering around town squares, though. Photos of a herd of goats ambling unsupervised along the high street in Llandudno, Wales hit UK national headlines on March 31, but Spain had already bought the T-shirt: Nearly two weeks earlier, on March 19, residents in the town of Chinchilla, Albacete province – to the west of that of Alicante – flocked to their windows when they saw loose goats pottering about in a central Plaza.
A video by Twitter user Tarabilla02, captioned, “The whole town to themselves,” went immediately viral. (See picture two).
Read more at thinkSPAIN.com