STREET CATS & WHERE TO FIND THEM

Hello, kitties of the world.

Bogle proudly calls himself a “cat dad.” His path to this form of parenthood wasn’t obvious. He didn’t live with cats when he was a kid. Inheriting his parents’ views—“Cats aren’t nice. They bite. Their pee smells”—Bogle was predisposed not to like them. “This cat is going to ruin my life!” he whined when a girlfriend told him they were going to care for her aunt’s pet, Kitt. Within a few hours, this 24-year-old was a new man. Kitt was purring into his shoulder and sleeping on his chest. He wondered: “What in the hell was wrong with my parents?” Bogle has since made up for lost time. He’s rescued cats, bottle-fed kittens, and, in his words, “watched approximately two million hours of English football (a.k.a. soccer) on TV with at least one cat sleeping on me.” A travel writer and photographer, Bogle began documenting his encounters with strays all over the world. His book showcases 20 places where he’s made feline friends. “When it comes to street cats,” he writes, “I admire how they can be back-alley tough; live on scraps; endure intense heat, extreme cold, and driving rain; and survive it all with nothing but generations’ worth of literal street smarts matted into their DNA, yet still crane their neck to say hello there, kind stranger, please immediately stop what you’re doing and pet me.” Among his “drool-worthy photographs,” as he justifiably calls them, are images of cats he meets in the parks of Lima, Peru: “Never in my life have I seen so many cats sitting on so many laps!” He spends time with cats that hang out amid the produce at a market in Santiago, Chile; on carpets in the old city of Marrakesh, Morocco; on Tashirojima (“Cat Island”) in Japan; and, if you please, the very welcoming Café des Chats in Paris.

An irresistible collection of international cats, as photographed by an exuberant “cat dad.”