I do not speak Cat, nor can I read feline minds. But as the black cat reluctantly approached me, her slim body tense and close to the dusty street, I could see clearly what was going on in her head. From second to second, her thoughts seem to flash back and forth between the question “Can I trust you?” and the demand “I need to eat.” As her white paws crept forward onto the pavement, her eyes jumped up and down between the scary human and the food just placed in front of her. Finally, she ate.
The cat and I met in Attaba, a neighborhood in the center of Cairo, in April. She was a local street cat, and I was a participant in a guided walk with the delightfully named “Meow Tours.” Since 2019, Egyptian photographer and visual artist Mostafa Abdel Aty has been organizing these free tours through different areas of Cairo. Egyptians and foreigners alike have followed him through the streets of the megacity looking for stray animals to feed. The goal, however, is not to simply fill the bellies of Egypt’s homeless cats and dogs for a day. Instead, Mostafa wants to prove to everyone that these animals, held in so much contempt by many Cairenes, are not dangerous and should not be poisoned or abused — that they can, in fact, offer comfort and companionship, bring out the best in humans and lighten the hardship of big city life.
I met Mostafa for the first time in March 2023. I had stumbled across the Meow Tours page on Facebook and wanted to hear what it was all about. When I suggested one of my favorite cafes in downtown Cairo, Mostafa texted back saying he did not want to meet there. It was no good, he said, because “recently one of the staff killed a street cat.” We decided on another downtown coffee shop, where cats roam freely between the water pipes and plastic chairs set up on a quiet back street.
Mostafa is 35 years old, with big, curly hair and thick, pink-rimmed glasses. He smiles often and likes to crack jokes. But it wasn’t always like that. During our first meeting, he told me that Meow Tours originated in a phase of deep depression.
In 2015, he had just gone through a painful breakup with the woman who had ignited his love for animals in the first place.
“Whenever we were out together, she would play with the animals in the streets,” he recalled. During their one-year relationship, Mostafa, too, grew closer to the stray cats and dogs. After his girlfriend broke up with him, it was the four-legged creatures who gave him comfort. “I found that animals were able to get me out of a bad mood. They would approach me as if they knew that I was sad and wanted to console me,” he said with a pensive smile.
During this time, Mostafa started visiting animal shelters on the outskirts of Cairo. He learned about the abuse these animals had faced in the streets or their former homes, and he saw how shelters were trying their best but were underfunded and ill equipped to care for a large number of strays. “Nobody even knew about their work or gave them any credit for it,” Mostafa told me, adding: “Most people here don’t know anything about animals; they see them only as a threat. When a dog barks, they call it ‘rabid,’ even though it just wants to play. When a cat approaches them, they think it will scratch. There is a huge misunderstanding between the two sides.”
Mostafa decided that spreading awareness was the key to changing the situation of street animals in Egypt. By introducing people to shelters he could encourage them to support their work. And by showing them that street animals did not need to be feared, he could improve the relationship between the animal and human inhabitants of Egypt, which would stop the abuse and killing of stray dogs and cats. With these two missions in mind, Mostafa started Meow Tours in 2019.
After my first meeting with Mostafa, a year passed until I finally made it to one of his tours. I was not always in Cairo when they took place, and they sometimes happened quite spontaneously — when he was free or when his on-and-off volunteers were available to help. Finally, in April 2024, I was added to the WhatsApp Group “Meow 134 — Attaba” and 11 other participants and I received the meeting location and instructions from Mostafa in Arabic: “Each one should bring enough food for the cats and dogs. According to your abilities, of course, but make sure to bring appropriate food in a reasonable quantity. So, if it is dry food, a kilo for dogs and a kilo for cats would be nice.” He added that people could bring plastic gloves if they needed them and that everyone was encouraged to take photos during the tour, then signed: “Meow Meow.”
On the day of the tour, I met up with a friend in downtown Cairo and went on an unexpectedly difficult quest to find a pet store to purchase the kibbles. After passing several locations that according to Google were pet shops but actually weren’t, and asking several people for directions, we were finally able to fill our backpacks with several packs of little bone- and flower-shaped pellets that we hoped would cater to the taste of Attaba’s canine and feline communities.
Attaba is a historic neighborhood at the heart of Cairo. It is known for its bustling markets that offer every kind of product from musical instruments and books to secondhand clothing and electronics. Thousands of kiosks and shops spread out from the Central Train Station around the site of the old Cairo Opera House and underneath Al-Azhar Bridge, which leads to Cairo’s ancient Islamic quarter. Attaba is, in one word, mayhem. Between the honking of cars that squeeze through market streets crowded with shoppers and the incomprehensible shouting of special offers that vendors play from subpar recording devices, one could probably scream in the middle of the street and nobody would notice.
Around 3 p.m. we arrived at the meeting point, a shut-down pharmacy between the noisy intersection of Ramses Square and the quiet residential back streets that we were about to explore. We joined a group of five men and seven women, all Egyptians ages 20 to 40. One woman in her early 20s had brought white bread, tuna and cold cuts. She was preparing sandwiches for the animals while Mostafa explained the ground rules: Do not scare the animals by approaching abruptly or in groups. Crouch down and approach them slowly, let them come to you. “Remember that they have been beaten and had bad experiences. Some will not eat before you leave; others might want to be fed from your hand.”
And most important: So as not to bother anyone, do not place food directly outside the door of a shop or a house. Mostafa warns us that the reactions from local residents might not be pleasant. Some might have an issue with the feeding of street animals because they do not want their numbers to increase. Others might be bored and looking to harass someone. “In that case, just be polite and move on. We don’t want Muhammad and Hussein and all the guys from the neighborhood joining in and starting a fight.”
With that said, we reluctantly started walking. The thing about walking in Cairo is that you generally do not want to attract attention. As a woman, I always walk with determination, trying to avoid any opportunity for someone to chat me up or comment on my appearance. Add to that a general mood of suspicion toward people who look like they do not belong in a certain area, or at least a nosiness when someone behaves out of the norm — which our group of young, middle-class Egyptians wearing plastic gloves and feeding animals in a “shaabi” (traditional) neighborhood definitely did.
What I love about Egypt is the certainty that everyone is always looking out for everyone. If you get into trouble in public, it will take only seconds until passersby gather, intervene and offer support. But the other side of that coin is that there is often an uncomfortable feeling of being watched and judged. Sadly, this comes along with a sense of distrust fostered by years of arbitrary political oppression.
To say that some participants felt a bit uncomfortable as we set out on our tour is an understatement, especially after Mostafa’s introduction. But after the first dog peeped out at us from under a car and the first cat was fed on the sidewalk, we gradually started to relax. The group dispersed as people lingered in different spots. Some left food on the pavement and watched the animals eat from a distance; others carefully petted them with gloved hands. Others still went into full-on bare-handed cuddles with the pleasantly surprised street dogs.
It did not take long until the local residents started talking to us. But while we did hear the occasional “Why don’t you feed the people before you feed the animals?” or “You feed them, we throw stones at them,” most reactions were completely different from what we had expected. Three young boys came up to us, asking if they could have some food to feed the dogs on their street. An old woman sitting on a chair on the sidewalk asked for cat food. She was already feeding the cats outside her shop but wanted to make sure they had enough. Another woman called down from a balcony, telling us to feed the puppies in her alley.
As we moved further into the neighborhood — passing a street sign that to everyone’s excitement read “Alley of Cats” — the architecture and atmosphere changed. On the spacious main road, the buildings had been dusty and rundown, but their wooden balconies and faded yellow arcades had an ancient charm to them. The back alleys, on the other hand, wound tightly around buildings that were half finished or half torn down, interrupted only by large empty spaces piled with trash.
The deeper we dove, the more people wanted to know what we were up to. Clearly, they were not used to strangers, let alone tour groups, roaming through their neighborhood. Luckily, Sherif, a local resident with tight white pants, a pink shirt and fake Ray-Bans, decided to join us. Not only was he known to everyone in the neighborhood and so reassured people about the motives of our group, but he also seemed to know exactly where the cutest animals of the area were hidden.
In one cul-de-sac we discovered a bunch of sandy-colored puppies. Everyone stopped to take pictures, play with them and watch as they were being nursed by their mom. Suddenly, a panicked voice shot around the corner: “Those are my babies. What are you doing to them?!” The voice belonged to a woman in a bright orange traditional dress and a light headscarf who calmed down as soon as she understood that we were not poisoning her puppies. Her name was Rahma — which, appropriately enough perhaps, means mercy in Arabic — and she was a former government employee with dark eyes set in a small, tanned face. She started smiling as she told us how much she loved her strays. Dozens of cats lived in her apartment, she said, and she fed the dogs every morning.
“I just want them to experience some tenderness and affection,” she explained.
As we talked, more neighbors gathered around us to chat. They seemed almost proud as they told us about their own experiences feeding the cats and dogs in the area. A middle-aged man wanted to know all the details about the type of cat food we were using. He took a close look and smelled the pellets, as his friend joked: “Why don’t you try them?” Meanwhile, one of the guys from our group showed a shy little girl from the neighborhood how to feed a friendly dog that had settled down next to us. Soon, all fear and reservations had vanished — between humans and animals as well as between humans and humans.
That day in Attaba was one of his favorite tours so far, Mostafa told me a few months later during a Zoom call that happened to take place on the International Day of Cats — as much a coincidence as stumbling upon the Alley of Cats in Attaba and equally as exciting to everyone involved. Mostafa had just come back from Tanta, a city in the Nile Delta, where his family is from and where he wants to establish a third Meow Tours branch. Apart from Cairo, he already does regular tours in Alexandria and has some volunteers working with him in both cities.
What had impressed him most that day in Attaba was that even the people who did not like the animals had not bothered us. “Because they have neighbors who feed the animals, and they respect those neighbors,” he said, “that area was a perfect example of how people and animals can live together and accept each other.”
It also showed what Mostafa had already experienced throughout many tours — that contrary to stereotypes, poor or uneducated people do not treat animals worse than others. Quite the opposite. Tours Mostafa organized in the wealthier suburbs of Cairo often met with more negative reactions than those in underprivileged neighborhoods like Attaba.
“It is completely normal for rich people to poison animals,” he said. “They might be annoyed with the dogs barking in their street at night, so they just kill them.” On the other hand, Mostafa said, there are lots of people in every community who treat animals well based on their religious beliefs or simply because they have a good heart.
“Some people are kind, empathetic, merciful,” he said. Those who treat animals that way will do the same toward humans, Mostafa believes. “And vice versa: I am convinced that someone who beats animals does not treat people well either.”
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