If you love cats, or animals in general, then you’ve definitely heard about cat cafes. They’ve been popping up around the US in the past few years and they are ADORABLE! To put them into the simplest terms, they’re like normal cafes: you drink some coffee or tea, have a pastry, but you also get to hang out with amazing adoptable cats while you do it.
We are very behind on the cat café trend. The first ever cat café opened in Taipei, Taiwan in 1998 and the first one here didn’t open until 2014. Get your shit together America! We have plenty of adorable, adoptable cats and we only just started doing this now?? With as much success as they had in Asia, you would have thought we’d jump on the bandwagon sooner. Japan alone has 150 cafes AND a whole cat island!
Cat cafes are a great way to advertise these cats and get them exposure to hopefully be adopted. A place like this is much more pleasant and inviting than a shelter. With the rows of sad faces, shelters can often be overwhelming and a bit upsetting to some. Conversely, at a cat café the cats look happy. They get plenty of attention and love hanging out until someone decides to adopt them. Approximately 7.6 million companion animals are in shelters nationwide. Of that, 3.4 million are cats. One café in South Carolina adopted out all the cats from their local shelter and started getting cats shipping in from all over the state! There are obviously more than enough cats to be showcased in these cafes if more cities started opening them.
The cat cafes in the US are different than the original ones in Taiwan and Japan. Because of food service regulations here, there does need to be a separation between where the cats actually are and where you can buy coffee and food. Don’t worry, this isn’t a huge problem, as you can still bring both things inside the cat areas. The cafes understand that this is obviously a sanitary concern and there is definitely a separation between work and play.
Between New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, there are about six cafes total, two in each state. The Brooklyn Cat Café was the first café to open up on the east coast, following in the pawsteps of Cat Town Café in Oakland, California. There are currently 64 cafes in the US, which is nothing compared to Japan. We need to keep the cat love coming!
Cat cafes are not only the cutest places to have some coffee, but you can also change your life and the life of a shelter cat by adopting from the cafes. What could be better than going for some coffee and cuddles, than actually coming home with that cat? NOTHING! Nothing could possibly be better! We need more cat cafes in our lives, America. Start building! These cats need us.
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