There’s a huge stray population living here, partly because many animals are simply abandoned and also because many Turkish Cypriots don‘t believe in spaying or neutering their pets.
Which means there are hundreds of semi-feral dogs roaming the streets who will quite happily trot along by your side in the hope you might feed or home them.
Or, as a number of people who I've spoken to have found, you might wake up one morning to find an abandoned litter of kittens on your doorstep.
To be fair, few of them look like they are starving and the majority don't seem too despondent to have fallen on hard times.
Given the English speaking world's need to take responsibility for, domesticate and anthropomorphise anything with fur, such a situation has not been allowed to go unchecked in the expat paradise that is the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus.
In 1997 Kyrenia Animal Rescue was set up by a group of women appalled at the amount of stray animals roaming the streets.
Thirteen years on and the organisation - now a charity - has grown in size to the extend that members have opened a rescue sanctuary high in the Besparmak Mountains which is currently home to more than 200 cats and dogs.
Cats are taken from the streets, neutered or spayed, and put back where they were found. Stray dogs are also given the same treatment.
But the rescue centre is always filled to capacity to the extent that workers and volunteers can only take seriously injured animals in.
A few weeks ago I was followed home by what is probably best described as a child’s toy. It looked a bit like this:
He came and sat outside the entrance to my apartment block so I took him inside, fed him, and gave him a new identity.
But Mr Fluffles wasn ’t happy being kept indoors so I decided to let him outside.
He then spotted someone walking by and decided to follow them home, no doubt to con them in a similar fashion. I‘m not going to lie, I felt cheap and used.
Am I trying to say that such animals are perhaps better equipped to cope with life on the streets than we give them credit for?
And that perhaps the situation isn’t quite as dire as it might seem?
No. For even the most intelligent dog is going to have difficulty negotiating the dual-carriageways now springing up in different parts of the country.
All I’d say is that any animal-lovers thinking about relocating to North Cyprus from the UK should bear in mind the huge difference in attitude towards stray dogs and cats here. And be prepared to turn into this person:
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