Women Who Travel Podcast: In Search of the Cats of the World
30.01.2025 - 20:05
/ cntraveler.com
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There are few places in the world where you won't encounter a cat. So a few years ago, Hannah Shaw, who has dedicated much of her life and work to caring for cats, set out to photograph has many as she could across the globe—spotlighting the extraordinary places they live and the people who care for them. Lale chats with the photographer and content creator about her many travels, from Turkey to Chile to Oman, and finds out what she learned along the way.
Lale Arikoglu: Hello, I'm Lale Arikoglu and this is Women Who Travel, a podcast from Condé Nast Traveler. Today's show is a little out of the box for us, which I'm quite excited about. It's about people, but people caring for cats around the world and the cats bossing us around.
Hannah Shaw: Loving cats felt like a secret handshake that gave me access to the world. A huge goal for me also was just to highlight the amazing compassion that exists everywhere. There's not a corner of the world where you cannot find somebody doing some kind of amazing, compassionate courageous act to help animals.
LA: I'm talking to New York Times bestseller author and animal rescue expert, Hannah Shaw.
HS: My history with cats really started about 15 years ago. I was an animal lover, but I didn't know anything about cats and kittens and I was living in Philadelphia. I was sitting on a park bench and I looked up into this tree and saw a little kitten looking down at me, and I ended up climbing this tree and bringing her back down and kind of going, "Oh gosh, what have I gotten myself into here?" I got really involved in kitten rescue in the US. We have some really unique challenges with the zero to eight week old population for kittens here, so I sort of ended up dedicating my life to problem solving how we can reduce euthanasia of that population in the US shelter system.
When it comes to the travel side of things, I love to travel. I always think there are people who love architecture, so when they travel, they want to take architecture tours or you love food, so you travel and you want to try the local cuisine. When I travel, I always found myself gravitating towards wanting to understand what is happening in this community with cats, which lends itself to a lot of interesting relationships and it sort of just naturally became a project that evolved into what is now this book.
LA: Tell me a little bit about the aim of the book. What did you set out to do when you embarked on these travels? Because so much of it is about the communities and individuals who are taking it upon themselves to look after cats in the places that they call home.
HS: Yeah.