A prominent pink notice stuck onto the front door of Boston’s yet to open and brand-new Purr Cat Café was embarrassingly unfortunate. It sent the wrong signal to the public and the reason why it was there is because somebody made an allegation of animal cruelty and reported it through the city’s 311 system. It seems that someone does not like cat cafés.
This resulted in an inspector coming around from the Inspectional Services Department. As nobody was at the café at the time the procedure is to stick a notice on the front door to allow the owner to contact the inspection services to discuss the matter and to let them in by appointment. I think the cat café owner, Diane Kelly, would have preferred a telephone call! It seems an unfortunate system and one that they might reconsider.
Unfortunately somebody photographed the notice and it ended up on the very active website reddit.com from where it spread quite rapidly around online social media presenting an entirely unfortunate image of this cat café, which looks very nice.
The reason, I believe, why somebody made a complaint to the authorities is because of the facilities in the basement which is an area where the cats rest. Apparently it was considered too small by the person. The argument is that the cats are too close together which may facilitate the transmission of disease. This may not be the full story but it is as reported on metro.us.
This hiccup has been overcome and after a number of false starts, one of which was to do with the supply of cats from a rescue center (they have a new supplier), Boston’s first cat café is all set to officially open this Saturday, November 18.
The Inspectorate said that they are obliged to follow complaints about animal cruelty which is quite natural but that they are not confirming any cruelty at this time by which I presume that they mean there is no animal cruelty.
The source of this article is metro.us
