A Tale Of Two Cat Cafes

5/18/2024

On our last trip to Honolulu we visited the Hawai'i Cat Cafe, a shelter and adoption center for rescue cats where visitors can come in, have a snack and a drink, and, if they wish, play with or just spend time with the resident kitties.

This year we considered a return visit to the Cat Cafe.
Now, the Hawai'i Cat Cafe was a good two mile walk from our hotel but I had in the meantime discovered that there was a new cat cafe in town half that distance, the Cat Cafe MOFF located inside the International Market Place, an upscale mall on nearby Kalakaua Avenue.

And so we decided to give the Cat Cafe MOFF a look.
We walked the mile from the Hale Koa down Kalakaua Avenue to the International Market Place,

and the Cat Cafe MOFF.**

The entrance fee was $23 per person for half an hour, though one could buy an hour of playtime for $28, and the price included a can of soda. (The cost to play with the cats at the Hawai'i Cat Cafe was $21 per hour or $17 per half hour for adults and $17 per hour or $12 per half hour for children).
The interior was bright and stylishly decorated and there were two staff members present in the cat playroom.

The cats were gorgeous,

...fluffy,

...exotic,

...and thoroughly uninterested in - in fact make that recoiled from - any human interaction unless they detected a treat. Small cups of cat treats were sold by the two staff members for three dollars a pop.
The cats mostly kept to themselves, resisting being approached by humans until they spotted a human proffering a cup of treats. They would then converge upon the treats,

... and seconds later when the treats were gone they would wander away,

...and wait, like nervous cat-zombies, for the next treat sighting, fending off the non-treat-bearing humans who had paid a lot of money to come and play with them.

After spending a ridiculous amount of dollars on several rounds of treat cups, each round gone in seconds along with the cats, we spent the rest of our visit mostly sitting around waiting for our half hour to be finished, along with our fellow visitors, who also appeared to be sitting out their remaining time rather than opting to buy more cat treats.

I heard one visitor say to another, "I wish we had only bought half an hour instead of an hour." I was at least glad we'd gone with the half hour option.
I noticed that from time to time cats would congregate around the curtain at the back of the room as if they were trying to get to whatever was on the other side.

At one point one of the staffers came from behind the curtain with a container of cat kibbles which he dumped onto the floor and which the cats fell upon.

That's when it hit me: These cats are addicts. They've been turned into cat treat addicts who are hooked on their treat fix and respond to nothing else so that the customers will have to keep buying three-dollar cups of treats to get the cats to come over to them.
I felt really badly for the cats. They weren't there to be sheltered or adopted into a home where they'd be loved and cared for. These were boutique cats who'd been put in this room for the sole purpose of making money off of tourists like ourselves for Cat Cafe MOFF.
After we left the place we felt sorry for the cats. We agreed that this had not been an enjoyable experience. We wished we'd gone to the Hawai'i Cat Cafe after all.
But in truth we had nowhere else to be, and so we decided that there was no reason why we couldn't go to the Hawai'i Cat Cafe now.
So we walked another mile out towards Diamond Head,

...until we came to this unassuming building,

...and the even less assuming door,

...behind which was the Hawai'i Cat Cafe.
Unlike Cat Cafe MOFF this was an actual cafe.

One could sit in the cafe and watch from behind a window the kitties in the playroom,

...or one could pay to go into the room and join the folks who were playing with the cats, which is what we did.

These were ordinary rescue cats who were there so that they might be adopted, which would then make room in the shelter for more cats who would also, hopefully, be adopted.