Newly opened cat café in Oxford, UK, has no cats (at the moment)

NEWS AND COMMENT: I don't think that we should be too critical of the Mac Kitten Coffee Shop. But they have just opened and they are described as a cat café which is normally quite a popular concept but sadly they have no cats. That is a major problem for a cat café!

Mac Kitten Coffer Shop. Picture by the Oxford Mail.

They are based near the Plain Roundabout. It opened on 9th February 2024 with customers claiming to be excited to be able to visit the establishment and interact with the cats.

But it's not clear yet when the cats will arrive. It may be a month before they are installed at the café. Note: we are not told where the cats are coming from but the usual M.O. is to take cats from a cat shelter based locally and to offer those cats for adoption to visitors to the café which is a nice way of working in partnership with a cat shelter. It should help to attract adopters and promote the local animal shelter.

It has to be said, though, that it is not easy to run a cat café because you've got maybe half a dozen or more cats confined to a strange place (initially) meeting strange people. 

You have to keep them inside that place safely and of course you have to look after half a dozen or more cats which is no mean feat while running a café which in itself is not that easy.

There are probably insurance issues to deal with which means added overheads which probably means adding to the price of the items sold. The workforce need to be au fait with looking after cats. They need to be cat lovers really. There are potential complications.

I don't want to be a wet blanket about this project but my gut feeling is that worldwide cat café's have not been a blinding success perhaps for the reasons mentioned above.

Nonetheless, I wish them the very best particularly if it enhances the prospect of people adopting rescue cats. 

The RSPCA, have claimed recently that their rescue centres are full up because of an increase in people abandoning their cats to the centres post-pandemic with a a parallel decrease in the number of people adopting cats. 

The reason? The cost of living crisis. Family budgets are tight. People are realising that it is not cheap to look after a domestic cat properly.

The Lib Dem candidate for Cowley Ward, Scott Urban, said: "A warm welcome to Mac Kitten Coffee Shop on Cowley Road. Do pop along and say hi! (Actual cats arriving next month.)”

The café was said to be impeccably clean and very welcoming. It would just be nice if there were some cats to welcome clients as well.

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P.S. please forgive the occasional typo. These articles are written at breakneck speed using Dragon Dictate. I have to prepare them in around 20 mins.

Ed Sheeran leaves fans in hysterics as eight cats run when he sings in a Japanese cat cafe

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Ed Sheeran is a great guy. So normal. It is nice to see. The video is from Sheeran's Instagram pages. He was at the Cat Cafe Mocha Lounge in Tokyo on Monday.

Ed Sheeran smiling after he scared away the cats with his singing.

Cat café has cats in cages in the restroom

Cats in cages in the restroom of a cat cafe. Screenshot.

This is a slightly amusing video but it was not mean to be like that. This a cat café somewhere, we don't know where. In the restroom there are four stacked cat cages some with cats inside. Is this deliberate to give the user an audience of cats?! A bit disconcerting perhaps although cats like to be with their owner when they go to the loo. So, it is okay for the cats.

I suspect the reason why the cats are in the restroom is because there is nowhere else to put them. As simple as that.

The video comes from the TikTok account of Hadeelo915. She is a Muslim and wears a headscarf which made me think that this was in the Middle East but I don't think it is. I think it is in the US (perhaps) as she calls the toilet a 'restroom'. Only Americans do that. In Britain we call them 'loos'. Very quaint.

For cats, cat cafés are like an innocent human being banged up in prison and beaten up

Ben the Vet on TikTok has an interesting take on cat cafés. He thinks they are unsuitable for cats. He seems to disagree with the entire concept. I think he'd get rid of them if he had the power to do so. The point he is making is that in cat cafés, a rather large number of cats are confined to a rather small space and this creates pressure on them territorially.

At a fundamental level domestic cats have the character of the African wildcat which is solitary. Domestic cats have learned to be social creatures over the nine thousand years of domestication but their solitariness is ever present and beyond a certain point being confined with many other cats can put too much pressure on some of them.

They become stressed and a fight can break out as seen in the video. This is why I disagree with multi-cat homes. Normally people who want to own many cats and keep then locked in their home are pretty insensitive to their cats' needs.

RELATED: Are cat cafés ethical?

For me they are ego-centric. They want a lot of cats for personal reasons. How the cats feel is secondary. It should be the other way around.

I think Ben has exaggerated the problem a bit with his analogy but it's an interesting one and it got me thinking which is why, I think, he said it.

And he mentions cystitis being caused exclusively by stress. He's suggesting that cats in cat cafes are going to be predisposed to contracting cystitis. And possibly get a bite and cat bites can be serious because of the bacterial infection injected under the skin. They wound will need to be washed out and the puss removed and the cat put on a course of antibiotics.

Squabbling cats at a cat cafe. Screenshot.

Cat cafés are struggling because of the pandemic

KitTea Cat café. Photo from the fundraising page.

Cat cafés are in the hospitality business. Well, they're actually in the cat rescue business as well but essentially they are in the hospitality business which is on its knees because of the coronavirus pandemic. The lockdown has pretty well stopped these businesses and social distancing has undermined them and the people work from home are less likely to visit cafés of any sort including cat cafés.

In this instance San Francisco's first and only cat café is in financial trouble and the owner is asking for help. KitTea Cat café in Hayes Valley opened in 2015. It is owned by Courtney Hatt who said that it was closed for much of the pandemic. It is now operating at a fraction of its normal levels and the income can nowhere near cover their expenses including a $10,000 rental. She wants to move to a cheaper place but the landlord won't release her from her five year lease.

San Francisco’s @kittea_sf is at risk of closing b/c they’ve had to cut back capacity during the pandemic.

Owner Courtney says they’re not being let out of their $10K a month lease.

They desperately need supplies & have @gofundmehttps://t.co/I9uyx5ywBR

(Me visiting in ‘19) pic.twitter.com/X4RMdFkYlJ

— Dion Lim (@DionLimTV) September 21, 2020

She became emotional when people offered to help. She needs food and supplies including cat litter. She has a Go Fund Me page if you'd like to contribute. It has raised a huge $43,000 at the date of this post. The anchor/reporter at ABC7 News, Dion Lim had visited the place and she tweeted about it, I guess with the intention of publicising their plight.

Kansas Animal Shelters Looking to Place Cats In Businesses

This is an imaginative new program by the Great Plains SPCA to place shelter cats into businesses such as The Raven Bookstore in Lawrence KS. There are several things that I like about this program.

It is imaginative. It seeks new ways to save the lives of shelter cats. It is time to do this sort of thing: to think out of the box. Also,  cats placed in businesses become working cats, really, and I like it when cats become really useful. It creates a pleasant balance between the domestic cat and the person and I think this is a healthy balance because in almost all cases the domestic cat is cared for by a cat guardian. Perhaps cats like to be useful.

Another benefit of this program is that, provided the business is enlightened enough, they discover that having a cat around improves work productivity and if the business is a shop or store it improves the ambience in the outlet and customers generally welcome it.

The presence of a domestic cat totally changes the feel of a place. It makes a place calm and gives it a soul. That might be a philosophical exaggeration but I think people will understand what I am getting at. One thing for sure is that the presence of a domestic cat makes people feel better.

So we can save the lives of cats and improve the lives of people under this program. This has to be a good thing.

Obviously there are things to think about and concerns about how to make it work. Some people are allergic to cats and some people don't like cats. And the cat requires maintenance. There has to be somebody on hand to look after the cat and there has to be teamwork within the business to ensure that a cat is content, happy and well looked after in his workplace. There is, therefore, some organisation to do but like all benefits to a business there has to be some input and work to achieve those benefits and this is a case in point.

The sort of businesses that particularly suit the presence of a domestic cat are bookshops and coffee shops (the cat cafe immediately comes to mind, of course). But there are also workplaces, offices, where a cat can make employees more productive. Certainly businesses that are involved with the Internet and writing code would suit the presence of a cat, in my opinion. These are semi-unstructured workplaces. They are modern thinking workplaces and therefore should be open to the possibility of having a domestic cat joining them.

I really hope that this program does well and I would like to see lots of shelter cats, some of which will be destined for euthanasia, finding their way into local businesses. It is worth remembering, I think, that this program probably suits adult cats more than young cats because adult cats are more stable and experienced therefore more able to cope with the change of environment.