From the People Who Brought You the Cat Café…

As I have noted on several previous posts, there are times when you run across something online that just seems too improbable to possibly be true – but you hope it is anyway. I try to avoid turning this blog into a collection of Internet freaks and oddities, since there already are sites that perform that function brilliantly. But the world is a strange and wonderful place, and there are going to be times when you encounter something as bizarre and amazing as a café where you can interact and play with a variety of tame owls…

Regular readers of this space (assuming I have readers) may recall a post I brought you some years ago about the “Cat Café” – a business type originally found in Japan which has now migrated to North America and Europe. A number of observers – including me – were initially unsure if this business model would succeed outside of Japan, where people are apparently much more fond of cats than you would reasonably expect, but it turns out that there are enough people who enjoy playing with a friendly cat while having a coffee in other regions of the world to make such operations commercially viable. But apparently playing with domestic cats at the coffee house was not weird enough for some customers…

You can check out the original article online if you want to; some of the pictures of the owls are adorable. Some of them are also clearly faked – you can’t have a bloody great bird of prey perch on your bare skin without getting punctured by the massive talons – but there are a good number that are either for real or extremely good Photoshop. It’s also kind of amazing that it’s possible to pet an owl (or touch one at all) without getting your fingers bitten off, but if this story is for real then it seems as though the birds enjoy the attention. And if interacting with humans involves getting tasty things to eat, well, most animals would probably be okay with it…

Now, we should probably note that there is no way this business model would work in the United States or any other country with strict laws about ownership of wild animals (or exotic pets, depending on your point of view). Just getting permission to own an owl in the US would be a major undertaking, and getting liability insurance for the café that will cover both owl-related injuries and allergy attacks and also defend against frivolous lawsuits of various kinds would be the next best thing to impossible. It might be possible to pull this off in the UK, where (as we saw when the Harry Potter movies were coming out) people do keep owls as pets despite the liability issues and the inconveniently large aviary you need to keep one in. Whether the British public is likely to be attracted to owls in the same way that American and Japanese consumers would be remains to be seen…

Personally, I don’t know that I’d want to handle an owl without specialized training and adequate safety equipment. But it might be interesting to sit down at the table with one and have some tea together. Well, I’d probably have a mocha, and I’d imagine the owl would be happier with a fresh prey animal to snack on, but the principle is the same. And if you actually managed to get an owl café up and running, it would certainly stand out from the huge crowd of coffee and tea shops I have encountered in my travels…

In a crowded industry, and in a world where cutting through the noise is becoming harder and harder to do in any business setting, I can think of worse gimmicks on which to base a business model…