Cat cafes: a novel idea, but do cats enjoy them?

Ireland has joined the latest global trend of cat cafes

Pete Wedderburn - Animal Doctor
© Bray People

Ireland's cats are taking over the country. First there were cat-only vet clinics (we have our own one in Bray, and there's one each in Cork and Dublin too). Last week, the next stage of country-wide cat domination arrived: Ireland's first cat cafe opened in Dublin.

The "cat cafe" is a phenomenon of our times: the term was accepted as a "new word" by the Oxford Dictionary in 2015.

Like many people, I initially misunderstood them. I thought that a cat cafe was a place where you could go and have a normal cafe experience (coffee, buns, snacks) but with the addition of a few cats that created a feline ambience.

The reality is different: a cat cafe is a place that you go and have a "cat" experience, with coffee and snacks hardly featuring at all. A cat cafe is really a form of supervised indoor pet rental. It's a location that's set up to allow you to look at, and play with, a variety of cats. Visitors pay a cover fee: it's €15 for 90 minutes in Dublin. No food or drink is served, but there's a drink vending machine, so you can buy yourself a cup of coffee or tea while there.

The cat café concept originated in densely populated parts of Asia, where strict regulations on apartment dwellers deprive many cat lovers of feline company. In Japan, the first one opened in 2004, and there are now well over a hundred cat cafes. The concept has spread to many other countries, including elsewhere in Asia, most European countries, North America, Australia and New Zealand. It's easy to see how in Dublin, where many private rental situations forbid the keeping of cats, this could become a popular leisure activity for people who like cats but aren't able to keep one themselves. It can also work well for families where some people are highly allergic to cats: the family members who are not allergic can get a "cat fix" without bringing cat allergens into the home.

Cat cafes often link up with local animal welfare groups, using rescued cats as their residential felines. This allows them to function as "shop fronts" for rescue centres, advertising animals that need homes. After a spell in the cat cafe for a few months, the cats are often then rehomed to regular visitors who have fallen for them, and new cats come in to take their place.

While there's an obvious demand for cat cafes from members of the public, there are concerns that they could end up exploiting cats who may not end up enjoying the situation. Some animal welfare groups (such as the RSPCA) claim that it's unfair to keep high numbers of cats in an enclosed space with different visiting humans who never become familiar to the animals. Other expert groups are more supportive: the expert feline advisory group, International Cat Care, believe that while it's a difficult environment to get right, it's not impossible, and that cat cafes are not necessarily "a bad thing".

However all sides agree that cat cafés need to be regulated and monitored to ensure that the cats (and visiting humans) do not encounter problems.

There are three main issues that need to be addressed.

First, whenever there are groups of animals mingling with groups of people, care needs to be taken to avoid potential disease risks.. Close monitoring of cat health is important: vaccinations and parasite control are paramount, with other issues including toileting hygiene, cat bites and scratches, and the risk of ringworm, a fungal skin infection that can be carried invisibly by kittens, and passed on to humans.

The second issue is the fact that many cats are loners, and they do not always enjoy the proximity of other cats. They may feel highly stressed when forced to endure the close company of animals that they have not chosen to be with. While it's true that pet cats living together sometimes form good relationships with each other, they often they do not, and owners often do not appreciate this lack of friendship between their pets. Even in private homes, cats often divide the house into territories, with each sticking to their own area. Stress-related illness, such as cystitis or dermatitis, are common in households where cats don't have enough private space. In a confined cat cafe environment, this could cause serious unhappiness amongst the resident cats.

The third issue for cat cafes is the potential stress caused by interacting with a range of different visiting humans. Pet cats vary considerably in their friendliness to humans. Some are very sociable to everyone, some are nervous of strangers, and some are aggressive to everyone.

Some of these differences are genetic, while some depend on the amount of interactions with humans in the early part of a cat's life. One thing is certain: it is not easy to predict how an individual cat will work out so it could be difficult choosing the right cats to be in a cafe.

More work needs to be done by animal behaviour scientists to work out whether or not cats living in a cat cafe environment are living lives that are sufficiently contented.

It's great to have cats featured as a positive part of human society, but care needs to be taken to ensure that the animals that feature in cat cafes do not end up accidentally suffering rather than enjoying the experience.