In Australia, Uber have teamed up with cat rescue organisations to provide a rent-a-kitten service at $40 a go.
This is a new service from Uber, a company that you may have heard about. Uber is a taxi or private hire booking service. You use your smart phone to book a car. You download the app to your smart phone. In Australia, the company has now expanded their service to include a kitten booking service. I suppose it is possible to do this because if you can book a car to take you somewhere you can also book a car to bring to you a kitten from a rescue centre, which is what they are doing.
Uber has teamed up with certain rescues centres in Australia to run this service. It cost you $40 (AUS) a time and once you have made your booking a car will come around to your home or your workplace with a kitten which you can cuddle up to for 15 mins apparently. In all sounds a little bit bizarre to me but I am old-fashioned, I suppose. It also sounds a little impractical. For the cat it will be stressful. And I don’t know how a person is going to cuddle up to a frightened kitten or cat in their office! That is a recipe for chaos.
The concept is that Uber make a bit more profit and it gives the rescue operations the opportunity to promote their cats. After a person has been with a kitten for a short while they hope that the person will adopt the kitten. Therefore, there is another way of increasing the number of adoptions of cats in their care.
As for the customer, it is said that they win as well because they have the opportunity to be with a charming companion animal for 15 min to help them chill out.
That is the concept as I understand it (unless it is an early April Fool’s joke). I may well have misunderstood it because I do not use Uber. The rescue organisations involved at the moment are Animal Service League of Queensland, Lort Smith Adoption Centre, Cat Haven in Perth, and the Cat Protection Society for Sydney.
I believe that in the USA there is a similar service for dog lovers.
