The Metropolis

Analyse this: why is the idea of a cat cafe so popular with Londoners?

Mike Pollitt | Friday 4 January, 2013 11:04

This week, as if 2013 had made a new year’s resolution of itself – the resolution being to be more about cats – came news of a proposed “cat cafe” at which Londoners would be able to buy tea, coffee and cakes, and to hire the services of a pliant mog.

This idea has proved wildly popular. At the time of writing, the cafe’s crowdfunding page has two and a half thousand Facebook Likes and has raised over £5000. Commenters there seem genuinely excited, moved even, by the notion of drinking in a cafe of cats.

Why is this? How can we explain the strength, and the depth, of this collective response? Here are some theories.

1. It’s an extension of the “generation rent” thing

It is, on reflection, entirely understandable that a generation of humans who are compelled to rent their homes by the month and their cars by the hour should think it natural to rent their pets as well. For one thing, as renters, many cannot keep a cat of their own. For another, ownership itself is an increasingly old-fashioned conceit. This is the baby boomers’ cultural bequest to their children: that permanence be for the old, the wealthy, and the dead. Our lives are but sequential experiences, to be paid for by the hour. The cat experience is just another to add to the bucket list.

2. The monetising of cats is the logical end point of our hyper-consumerist society

Renting a cat for pleasure is, when you think about it, a deeply shocking act. A cat cafe is just one well-constructed pussy joke away from being a cat brothel. The cats there being pimped out will cease to be cats. They will become commodities, and their objectification is an inevitable result. The fluffy ones and the purrers will be feted and loved; the scratchers and the scrawners sidelined and shunned. In a world where everything can be bought and sold, rented and loaned, why should cats escape the stroke of the market’s invisible hand?

3. People don’t love the idea of the cat cafe. They love the idea of the idea of the cat cafe

The cafe’s crowdfunding page has 2.5k Facebook Likes, and about 200 funders, who have chipped in anything from £5 for a pat to £130 for a year’s membership. 200 donors is a good number, but set against the thousands of Likes the story has gathered across the sites where it has been aired, one thing is very clear. People may like the idea of a cat cafe, but they like the idea of the idea of a cat cafe a whole lot more. Publically Liking a story about a cat cafe is a way of showing that you are the sort of person who likes the idea of a cat cafe. The popularity of the proposed cafe comes not from the cafe itself, which few of the Likers will ever visit, but in the opportunity it gives them to signal and affirm their preferences to their friends. It is, in that sense, primarily a virtual success.

4. The internet is a feline medium, and this a feline age

The final triumph of cats over dogs is now upon us. The power which the ancient Egyptians recognised in the cats’ sly eyes and prowling movements was supplanted in time by canine usefulness. For three thousand years dogs were just more use to us than cats: dogs guarded the homes of the weak, caught food for the hungry, and comforted the bereft. Cats caught the occasional rat. An unequal contribution. But now we have no need of assistance from the hounds. Now the dogs’ loyalty is boring. What we need is to be surprised and entertained. And so the numinous felines reassert themselves. They have conquered our internet, and are now at the gates of our city itself. There will never be a dog cafe, because the performance of the dogs would be a certain bet. People will pay for a cat cafe precisely because the cats might withold their delights. And the cats know it.

5. Cats are just really cool

Well they are.

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