Hello, I'm Lale Arakoglu, and this is Women Who Travel, a podcast from Condonast 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.

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. I'm talking to New York Times bestseller author, an animal rescue expert,

Hannah Shaw. 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 U.S. 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 U.S. shelter system.

When it comes to the travel side of things, you know, I love to travel. I always

think, you know, 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 lent itself to a lot of, you know,

interesting relationships. And it sort of just naturally became a project that evolved into

what is now this book.

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