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If you’ve ever wondered what happens when humanitarian principles are applied to a Ukrainian cat colony, I have the answer: nothing good, and absolutely nothing simple.
Not long ago, my husband and I were part of a humble, wholesome neighbourhood effort. Local residents were feeding stray cats along with a few low-key internationals who slipped in food between work calls and never made a fuss about it. The locals brought fish soup, scraps from their kitchens, and sometimes even proper cat food when they were feeling generous. It wasn’t glamorous, but it was community-driven and somehow it worked.
Then we left.
And new expats took over.
And suddenly, the cat colony became the pilot site of a UN-style intervention that never existed. What used to be a “throw some fish stew in the alley and see who shows up” situation transformed into a fully overengineered, donor-reportable, logframe-driven operation featuring:
Scheduled feeding times – twice daily, as though the cats were now a professionalised workforce requiring regulated shifts.
Geotag location collars – because, naturally, we needed to map their movements to identify transboundary migration flows, early warning indicators, and future opportunities for cross-border cooperation frameworks.
Emergency medical assessments via photographs – one cat was stung by a bee, but, based purely on pixel interpretation, it was declared a catastrophic mandibular fracture requiring surgical intervention and a long-term rehabilitation plan. It healed in two days. Without intervention. Or a single monitoring visit.
A network of international temporary fosters – because how else are you going to keep donors on the hook for phase II?
The aunties who once brought leftovers no longer bother because the foreigners “have a system”. And the whole colony has become dependent on imported cat food, imported time, imported structure, and imported stress.
If this isn’t the humanitarian sector in a nutshell, I don’t know what is.
The whole thing now resembles a mid-sized UN project more than a neighbourhood stray-feeding routine. In fact, it’s the perfect parody of what happens when international aid accidentally steps on something that used to function just fine.
The locals (the original owners of the “project”), the ones who knew which cat hated which soup, slowly stopped participating.
Why?
Because nothing kills community participation faster than a well-meaning expat showing up and saying: “We love your system! Thank you so much! We’ll take it from here. Here’s the new feeding schedule, injury-reporting protocol, and a link to the data dashboard we built last night.”
Suddenly the cats, formerly scrappy, independent, and resourceful, are now slightly overweight and staring judgmentally at anything that isn’t premium pâté. The aunties who once brought leftovers no longer bother because the foreigners “have a system”. And the whole colony has become dependent on imported cat food, imported time, imported structure, and imported stress.
If this isn’t the humanitarian sector in a nutshell, I don’t know what is.
This colony is now:
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Highly structured
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More expensive than necessary
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Dominated by external actors
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Dependent on continuous outside support
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Leaving the original community disengaged and disempowered
If I submitted this as a case study to a UN conference, I’d get a panel slot titled “Localisation Challenges in Feline Humanitarian Response: Lessons Learned.”
What was once a community-led effort, messy, imperfect, but sustainable, is now a miniature humanitarian operation complete with 1. mission creep (are we feeding cats or building a monitoring system for them?); 2. dependency creation (cats who refuse to forage because the buffet arrives twice daily); 3. resource misallocation (again, why does a street cat need a GPS?); and 4. decision-making seized by whoever has the strongest WiFi and the least humility.
If the cats could talk, they would have already formed a small civil society organisation and applied for a UNDP grant to “strengthen local ownership of feline nutrition pathways”.
Maybe – just maybe – the lesson here is that sometimes the locals had it right all along. Not every “project” needs optimising, digitising, professionalising, or to be mapped with ArcGIS Pro.
Sometimes all you need is a bowl of fish soup, a handful of scraps, and a permanent community that cares.
And maybe – just maybe – the same could be said for half the humanitarian aid projects I’ve seen.
