I’m a great believer in the power of New Year’s to set the tone for the next 12 months, so it was with the heaviest of hearts that last week I made the long journey to Ankara and back again in the same day merely to end the life of one of my many cats.This would be a hard decision at any time, but in Cappadocia it’s made worse by the shortage of appropriate veterinary care close at hand. For a blissful couple of years, I befriended someone at the Kayseri Vet School who ensured that my cats were well cared for even during the heaviest of snowstorms. But inevitably it was an arrangement too good to last, and my friend was eventually promoted to swell the ranks of the Ankara bureaucrats. His wife runs a clinic there, which is all well and good, except that if you live in Göreme and don’t own a car a visit means a bus journey of five hours in each direction. That’s rather like making the journey from Swansea in Wales to London in England and back again in the same day just to see the vet. Any British person would think you mad if you so much as suggested doing any such thing.
It’s not that we don’t have vets locally, rather that their specialties tend to be the care of cows and horses instead of cats and dogs. Not only that, but their surgeries lack convalescent facilities which means that they will give you back a sick animal with instructions to administer daily injections or a cocktail of medicines, things which would be hard enough to manage in their surgery with an assistant to help let alone at home with no one on hand to restrain flailing claws.
There’s also another problem that would not normally arise in the UK, and that is that few Turks even in the veterinary profession believe in what most English people would regard as mercy killing (any more than they believe in neutering animals -- “you’re robbing them of their sex life, Pat”). So when I first took my sickly cat to Ankara for diagnosis and an attempt at treatment I feared that I would eventually have to bring it back to Göreme anyway to try and find someone prepared to put it to sleep -- a truly dismal prospect.
Unfortunately the diagnosis was not good: untreated kidney stones had resulted in damage to vital organs including the lungs. After a week of treatment, my poor Tui was still struggling to breathe, and I made the tough decision that the time had come to put him out of his misery. Fortunately, this time the vet did agree to do the dirty deed for me. Tui died in my arms before I made that lonely journey back from Ankara. A very adult thing to do indeed.
Pat Yale lives in a restored cave-house in Göreme in Cappadocia.
