Cat Cafes
Cat cafes are a real thing. I just now found this out. What is a cat cafe, you ask? Allow me to explain, but not before qualifying that those who might be reading this who are loud, irresponsible, prone to uncontrollable bouts of obnoxious enthusiasm, and of below-average intelligence, also known as “dog people,” need read no further — may I suggest closing your browser and focusing your energies on making sure your pet doesn’t take a sh-t on your new mattress instead. Yes, at the risk of alienating a huge portion of TC’s readership, I must deign this post a post ‘for’ the more cultured of us; the more stable, mature, calm individuals capable of keeping it together under high stress circumstances and engaging in the deepest of deep discourse with our stylish friends who are much more cultured than you and yours. Also known as “cat people.”
The cat cafe is a wildly innovative concept, and I’m going to go over it in much more specific detail soon, but for the reader to truly understand the concept of the cat cafe I will first attempt to explain what a cat is. A cat is a small, some might say fragile creature that was created by God to amuse human beings by being (statistically) ‘perfect’ fodder for YouTube videos and internet image macros, or pictures of cats being cats with superimposed text about being cats.
Cats have four legs and a face and a body, which makes them very easy to pet them and love them for their average ~12 year lifespans. The opposite of a cat is a dog, which also has four legs and a face and a body, but, curiously, lacks brains and the ability to be catlike.
A cat cafe is a cafe with cats. Humans pay to go into cat cafes for an allotted amount of time and play with the cats. They are charged an hourly fee for entry into the cat cafe. Inside the cat cafe, cats roam freely, playing with each other, playing with humans, and feeling positive about things like ribbon and upholstry. The Wikipedia entry for cat cafe — where I’m getting 100% of my information about cat cafes — says that cat cafes are popular in Japan; the city of Tokyo has 39 of them, by last count. 39 cat cafes. That’s so many cat cafes that many are suited to meet specific human-cat needs, carrying only specific categories of cats: black cats, fat cats, rare breed cats, ex-stray cats.
So, in Japan, there are cat cafes. This isn’t a new concept — the first cat cafe opened in Taiwan in 1998. But why go to a cat cafe, anyways? Here are the pros and cons of the cat cafe:
Pros
- Get to see cats
- Get to pet cats
- Get to play with cats
- Get to use laser pointers, flashlights, and ribbons to play with cats
- Get to hold cats
- Get to see cats play with other cats
Cons
Duh, there are no cons, you dumb idiot.
Obviously, cat cafes rule, and the inhabitants of every urban center deserve at least twenty within a two-mile radius of their place of residence. But are there dog cafes, you might ask? To that I answer — who cares? Cat cafes are real; the future is now. Airplane tickets to Tokyo are as low as $796 in mid-February. It will be cold there then but it won’t matter because there are so many cat cafes to spend time in. Who’s down?