Maybe she was living among the Ewe ("Eweh"), it was in the Ewe area (Southeast Ghana) that you would see signs outside chop bars (AKA restaurants) saying "Yes, we have cat soup today". And in the markets there you'd see these real depressed-looking cats tethered in cages who's nine lives were clearly about to run out.
I don't recall Ashantis ever ate cats, we had a few in my village. Ain't no fat cats in West African villages. Most all the chickens too are free-range and hatch their own young, a cat which ate baby chicks would be dispatched petty quick. And's besides people, there's more'n a few things in the bush that would take out a cat.
Yet, there was one cat in my village known to me the whole three years, a female, skinny and scrawny as all get out, but friendly enough. It never did use up all those lives when I was there, but had clearly already lost at least a few. When it had litters I would guess three out out of four of the kittens wouldn't make it.
Dogs were another story, though I never had either dog or cat soup. Most dogs you did see, skinny basenji-looking things, belonged to hunter/poachers and would trot along at their heels when they went into the woods. If you had five dogs in a village of 1,000 people, that was a lot. Children herded sheep, and nobody herded the pygmy goats. The sheep were hair sheep, no wool, kept mostly to be eaten.
'Nother thing is, rabies was common, and a real health hazard, people died of rabies more'n snakebites. One morning I was eating at the chop bar in my village in a place as usual walled off with corrugated iron sheets. Next thing I know I hear the sound of many running feet on dirt and the repeated warning shout of "Onniooo!" ("mad dog").
What happened when that happened is that able-bodied guys would take up their machetes and long poles if they had one and intercept the dog. One time in the driveway of the the Peace Corps office in Accra when this happened the staff pinned the animal with a ladder before killing it.
I was a habitual distance runner and pretty quick on my feet in those days and would have joined in in a heartbeat except that if the Obruni (me) joined in, I might become a distraction more than the dog was (I used to tell 'em that before White folks came to Africa they had nothing to talk about, they prob'ly STILL gossip about "Mister Mike" and its been 34 years).
I'm sure they dispatched that dog though I wasn't there to see. Didn't thing anything of it at the time, just went about my business, so did everybody else.
Anyhow, I was there for the "December 31st Revolution" AKA the coup that brought about the second coming of Junior Jesus AKA Flight Lieutenant JJ Rawlings and its aftermath.
Interesting times.
Birdwatcher
