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Harringay, Haringey - So Good they Spelt it Twice!

Calico Cat Cafe in Tokyo where you can pet a cat for £7.50 an hour

 

Japan’s capital city can be a tough place for a cat lovers to live. Small apartments, long work hours and restrictive housing codes make it difficult for Tokyoians to keep cats at home. No wonder then that the city is seeing an increasing number of cat cafes - lounges where cat lovers can drink coffee and find some catisfaction.

Now a campaign is aiming to raise £108,000 to open a 'cat café' in London this year.

Lady Dinah's Cat Emporium has set up an online IndieGoGo crowdfunding initiative in an attempt to generate the cash by March, and so far just under £5,000 has been donated to the scheme.

 

 

Links:

More about Cat Cafes from The Guardian's travel pages

Lady Diinah's crowdfunding page

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The staff will all get Toxoplasmosis. I tried to get something like this going at work where we have a mouse problem.

The Coliseum would be ideal for this. Perhaps Paul Simon Seaton would let us use it rent-free as a gesture of goodwill ?

Or not.

I love cats (being a member of the local cat-sitting group!) but I dislike this idea - some cats love the attention of lots of people but some hate it - and the idea of evening events involving a lot of people, a lot of cats, and quite possibly a lot of alcohol sounds like a recipe for disaster...

Excellent. Essentially a brothel, only with cats instead of women. This is a terrible idea, and the woman behind this has not given a single thought to the nature of cats or their wellbeing. I'll be sure to report this attempt of animal cruelty to the RSPCA and a few others. Hopefully others will too.

I've seen this in a couple of places online.

Would be an interesting one from a food hygiene standpoint, "Would you like cat hair with that?". The most important aspect is that It really has had no thought put into the animal welfare side of things.

They'll need a license from their local authority for this, and they need to ensure proper living conditions for the cats in their care. It'll hopefully never come to anything.

Cat cafes have been going on all around the world for years, and they're a great success. All the cats are very well looked after, with in-house welfare officers, and they all have quiet places to go when they want/need a break. All the cats will be re-homed from an animal rescue charity and chosen for their temperament, which will most likely be older cats which are usually harder to re-home, and they will be given a chance to get used to their new home and family before any members of the public are allowed in. There will also be outdoor-space for the cats to roam in. Worth a read before making assumptions.

There's a great FAQ on their website here

I'm afraid I disagree.

The post from Sharon looks rather like astroturfing to me.

Most cats I've known from rescue charities have significant issues, including my own cat. He only trusts new people whom he has got to know over a period of months of regular contact.

As an owner of rescue cats myself I could not agree more. Hence my previous comment.

I've spent a lot of my life around rescue cats, both growing up and volunteering. We took in 2 cats as a family, one youngster and one older cat. Both were friendly, sociable cats (though one of them didn't like to be picked up) and they would spend most of their time outside making friends with the neighbours (Squeaky would constantly try to make friends with one of the neighbourhood dogs, which was mostly confused as to what she was trying to do with it!) I spent 2 years regularly volunteering at the local Cats Protection shelter, as well as working trapping strays for their neutering programme, which had three sections at their location - one for feral/semi-feral cats which were usually neutered/spayed, given their shots and then released if they were too wild to be rehomed with a family, usually to live as farm cats; one as a rehoming pen, for those cats able to be homed; and one huge pen that was for the older cats and/or those that no-one adopted. While they lived happily in a large pen together, with their own spaces to go, I couldn't help thinking that it was sad that they just got locked away in a pen with no human contact. Many of them came to the shelter not through any fault of their own, but because their elderly owner had died or gone into care, or there was a problem in the family that meant they couldn't be taken care of anymore. The rehoming shelter I volunteer at now is always full of cats given away because people can't afford to look after them any more, or they've had a baby and decided they don't want the cat any more, despite having the cat as a family member for many years.

Cats are social creatures, and as long as they are looked after under veterinary care, with food and water and places to go if they need peace and quiet, it surely must be worth giving a cat a chance to have somewhere with company and love and care, rather than sentencing it to the rest of it's life locked in a cage.  The Mayhew Centre obviously think so, and they should know their animals better than anyone.

I hear what you're saying, I just don't believe in forcing a whole load of cats to live together in that environment (a cat cafe). Cats are mostly social creatures - on their own terms - but they also have their own hierarchy, and being part of such a large group of randomly selected cats can potentially prove enomously stressful for a lot of them. Which ones, you won't know for sure until it's too late, and they're already stuck in the brothel cat cafe, and also thet're being approached by complete strangers at all times. I'm not sure if a choice between this and living in a cage is a fair one. Both will be really stressful for the cat, and I just don't see the point. Cats are not here as toys for humans. If this idiotic idea goes further, I'll be sure to lobby the local council so this venture is not granted any sort of license to open.

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