One of Tokyo’s famed cafes has been ordered to shut amid
concerns that cramped conditions are spreading diseas.
One of Japan’s famed cat cafes has been closed down for
violating animal cruelty laws in the first crackdown of its
kind.
The cafes, where customers pay a premium to drink coffee and
stroke cats in spaces normally not much bigger than a living room,
have become hugely popular since springing up more than a decade
ago.
But The Cat’s Paw cafe in Tokyo’s Sumida district has fallen
foul of the city authorities amid concern about neglect for the
animals.
City authorities said the cafe had to close for a month for
violating the animal welfare act. The 30sq metre cafe was home to
62 cats, many of them elderly and in bad health. In the cramped
conditions, illness allegedly spread among the cats, leading
customers to report the cafe for animal cruelty.
It is the first time that authorities have closed down a cafe
for neglecting animals but an official said the city would not
hesitate to close down other cafes if they were found to be
neglecting animals.
“The cafe breached animal welfare laws, so we took action,”
Yachiyo Kurihara of the Tokyo Animal Welfare Centre told The
Guardian. “We warned the cafe in January and told them how to treat
their cats better, but the neglect continued.”
Kurihara said that it was uncertain whether the cafe would open
again. “It will depend on whether they improve.”
Taiwan opened the world’s first cat cafe in 1998 and Japan
followed suit in 2004. Since then, the number of animal cafes has
proliferated in Japan, where many people live in apartment
buildings that forbid pets. Customers can go to different cafes to
pet animals as diverse as hedgehogs, horses, rabbits and owls
today. There are around 150 cat cafes in the country.
Kurihara says that all animal cafes have to register with the
government and comply with welfare laws. Cafes not doing so, she
said, would also be inspected, instructed on how to treat their
animals better and closed if they failed to comply. “If people see
something wrong in a cafe they visit, we urge them to contact
us.”