Companion Animals

Tokyo has found a new fad. At the Cat Café Calico, punters with a yearning for some feline contact can pay 800 yen a hour to spend time with 14 well groomed cats, as long as the humans are prepared to go through an extensive hygiene ritual.

One heavy user, 32 year-old system engineer Kazunori Hamanaka, has found great comfort from the café. On an average visit, he will take over 200 pictures for his blog. Apparently stray cats are camera shy as they run away when he tries to stroke them. He said of the cafe: “It’s really soothing. Even three hours is not enough.”

I am currently house-sitting for my brother and am sharing a four bedroom house with a Barney, a black cat with an abscess on its anus. I am not finding it particularly soothing although it might be good for my diet: on the first morning I came downstairs to find ‘Barnes’ whisker-deep in my pork’ n herb chipolatas.

Although I am not anti-cat, I can understand why someone has created http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bUlE3_vm9jA

Admittedly, I prefer dogs (why does no-one state they prefer goldfish to budgies?) but I would not go as far as http://the-sunshinegirl.blogspot.com/ , although if that is your walk in the sunshine, feel free to leave her a “tail wag”.

As I roam from room to empty room, I can understand the need for contact. In Tokyo, a lot of apartments are the size of kennels. There is also the problem of developing crowd sickness, in which individuals feel overexposed to the white noise of their fellow man. In those conditions, to stop them having a ’Network’ moment, I can appreciate the ritualised need for shampooed cats and well ironed comics.

However, move the occupant from the dog-house to a ghost house and the experience of finding claw marks on your mouse mat is not so soothing. Obviously, the perfect solution is to convert my brother’s house into a Cat Café. He won’t mind and my nieces have plenty of comics. Other people would spend time with the mog, I would make some money and have a chin-wag with the mugs.

At the moment, just having one cat would make it a hard sell but I intend to rectify that tonight. I have a bin-bag, a ski-mask and a polo mallet. I will bag some cats or get arrested. Either way, I’ll have some social contact.