Have you ever sat in Starbucks and thought you might enjoy your latte more if you were surrounded by cats? Dozens of them? No?
Then it’s a good thing you don’t live in Berkeley Springs, W.Va., which was bracing for the opening this month of what’s touted as being the world’s largest “cat café,” according to the Martinsburg Journal. Cat cafés, which originated in Asia, are sprouting in this country. They allow patrons to unwind alongside felines who are often available for adoption. Many locations have names that are puns, like KitTea or the Seattle Meowtropolitan.
But the new West Virginia operation, Give Purrs a Chance Cat Café, ratchets things to a disturbing new level. The Journal says it will feature “up to 40 cats running free in the large Victorian house” and will “be the first cat cafe to hold numerous weekly yoga classes, to have acoustic music nights with the cats and to offer dance night with the cats.” (We’ll hope that the acoustic music isn’t produced on fiddles with catgut strings.)
As you might expect nowadays, the trend alarms some animal rights activists. “Living with multiple cats and having people pet them for over eight hours, you can imagine the level of stress on these cats,” a Japanese critic told the Japan Times last year. Tokyo authorities shut one location that was less a cat café and more a cathouse: Frisky felines had bred uncontrollably, resulting in 62 cats in a space licensed for 10.
We’ll leave it to readers to draw any larger conclusions about what the rise of these places means for America. But a country wealthy enough to indulge in yoga classes with cats can’t be in that bad a shape—right?
