[CAT] "Feline fine: the café cats of Amsterdam"

[rfmcdonald]

The Telegraph features an article by Beulah Devaney looking at the cat cafes of Amsterdam. Apparently the city has such a rodent problem that cats make sense, everywhere.

When I first arrived in the Netherlands I attended an expat cultural exchange workshop which consisted entirely of my fellow expats assuring me that I was probably already sharing a bed with at least three furry housemates. In London if I moved into a mouse-infested house I would have reacted with horror, convinced I was living in a festering dump. In Amsterdam, however, a few uninvited houseguests are par for the course.

Many reviews of Amsterdam cafés on TripAdvisor are from British and American tourists exclaiming in horror that there was a cat in the restaurant. They claim it's unhygienic to have a feline in a dining environment but little do these tourists realise that this is usually a mark of quality. Because a café with a cat is a café without mice. Or at least fewer of them. Cats just make sense in a city like this. Everyone has a cat, or a dog, or a really good reason why they've haven't invested in a furry rat catcher.

This is why it comes as no surprise that various Amsterdam businesses are defying food safety laws and keeping their cats to hand. Food safety inspectors have ominously informed the Dutch press that they will show no mercy when confronted with furry fugitives but it's hard to take these dire warnings seriously.

Amsterdam is a city that knows what's good for it: without cats in cafés we would be overrun by marauding mice. In fact we are so committed to cats that 975 residents were prepared to contribute to a crowdfunding campaign to launch Kopjes, a new Amsterdam café where you can pet eight feline residents, adopted from local animal shelters.