Japan is famous for its #cat islands, with close to a dozen small landmasses earning the moniker due to their large stray cat populations. However, one of the most famous, #Aoshima, located a 30-minute ferry ride off the coast Ozu of City in Japan’s Ehime Prefecture, recently made news by announcing that all its cats will be gone within the next few years.
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The announcement comes six years after the island began spaying and neutering the animals under the recommendation of the Aoshima Cat Protection Society, who deemed that the 130-strong feline population was too large for the 13 residents on the island to care for, particularly given that the average age of the human population was 75.
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Aoshima’s resident “Cat Mama” is one of the residents who provides a lot of the care for the animals, and even clears their poop from roads all over the 0.19 -square-mile island every day so the place looks spick-and-span for tourists.
With tourist numbers dropping, though, and boat trips from the mainland cancelled during inclement weather, there’s a danger of the cats going hungry, so the 73-year-old Cat Mama stores food for the felines year-round to ensure they never go hungry.
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Aoshima estimates that there are only two years left for #CatIsland, and it’s not just due to the ageing residents, as the cats are ageing as well, with every one of them now over seven years old.
It’s a very different situation to the past, when the island was bustling with 655 human residents in 1960, but in the decades since, residents have been leaving for the mainland and now the numbers of human and feline residents are at their lowest ever.
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Although it would be nice to see the island spring to life again with a large human population that can support the free-roaming kitties, in reality the end is nigh for this little Cat Island.
So if you’d like to support the cats and its five current residents, you’ll want to visit within the next couple of years, before all life on the island disappears, along with the ferry service.