JOIN USHave you been coaxing and cajoling your parents to get you a pet? If you are, like most children, your parents must have refused to let you have a dog or a cat.
“Please Mummy! Please Daddy! At least a cat; it’s not too difficult to look after a cat,” you must have pleaded to no avail. But if you live in Vienna, Austria, you can play with a clean cat, every now and then. At a place called Cafe Neko. It’s a 50-seat coffee house and is named ‘Neko’ as ‘Neko’ means ‘cat’ in Japanese.
Cafe Neko’s owners are Alexander Thuer and Takako Ishimitsu. Cat-friendly coffee houses are quite common in Japan, and Takako wanted to combine her love for coffee and cats in her adopted home, Vienna.
There are five cats in Cafe Neko called Sonja, Thomas, Moritz, Luca, and Momo. They roam around freely, and customers are allowed to enjoy their company.
Cat cafes originated in Japan because people are not allowed to have pets in their apartments. They visit cat cafes to play with the furry creatures.
There is no such problem in Vienna, but this cat cafe (a first for Austria) helps people who cannot keep pets at home perhaps since somebody in the family is allergic to fur.
The Cafe Neko owners, we are told, got all their cats from animal shelters, and then treated them with the necessary shots. It took three years for the city’s health officials to approve the cafe.
If we had some kind, enterprising person, in our country, who would undertake such a project, perhaps children who love animals could go to such a place occasionally.