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…

The Ethics of Owls

I was reading a story in the (London) Daily Mirror website this week about a little-known crisis in the UK: people who bought pet owls during the Harry Potter craze are now getting bored with the birds and dumping them off on people who run owl sanctuaries – or just abandoning their former pets in the wild. I was surprised to learn that there were no laws in the UK about owning an owl or keeping it as a pet; in the U.S. you’ll need specialized permits to have any raptor as a pet, and a lot of the states won’t allow such a thing. Even more surprising (at least to me) was the idea that you could just buy one; I immediately found myself wondering if there are owl breeders somewhere in Europe who raise broods of the birds for sale, if there are exotic pet stores that carry such animals, or if people just go out into the countryside and catch their own. But this isn’t the first case of movie-related pet fads coming and going that I’ve read about, and it struck me that there’s a larger ethical issue involved here…

Every time there’s a new movie featuring any particularly appealing animal, people will start trying to purchase one for themselves; marine biologists of my acquaintance tell me that this can even extend to seals, dolphins, penguins, and other creatures that common sense would dictate are not practical pets. In cases like the “101 Dalmatians” movies this can mean a huge surge in popularity of a featured breed of dogs, followed by a huge number of spotted puppies being abandoned when the novelty wore off and people realized that Dalmatians don’t really make good family pets. Things have gotten completely out of hand in cases like the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movies, which had the same effect on turtles despite the fact that pet turtles don’t eat pizza, wield traditional weapons, beat people up, or offer witty repartee while doing so, and anybody with a room-temperature IQ already knew that. The question begged by all of this is why anybody is selling these animals under such conditions – and do they have an ethical obligation not to?

On the one hand, a pet store is a business like any other, and not selling your customers products that they wish to purchase is not only a violation of the first law of business, but also not a good strategy. If you can obtain animals for $50 and sell them for $500 you would probably want to, and if you can do so without endangering the lives or well-being of the animals it would be hard to say there was anything wrong with doing that. Dalmatians are considered high energy and high maintenance pets, but are also highly trainable and rarely aggressive, making them good rescue dogs and excellent companions for runners and other very active humans; it seems only reasonable to let anyone who actually wants one (and didn’t just see the movie and get ideas) purchase such a dog. The same could be said for pugs, St. Bernards, and various breeds of cat which have all appeared in popular movies. If somebody wants a specific pet and can take care of it without endangering the animal or breaking any local laws, should a merchant really be expected to refuse the sale?

By the same token, there are some types of animal that are difficult to care for without specialized training and facilities, or are at least really inconvenient. A large owl will need at least a 20-foot aviary, with room to flap its wings five times before settling onto a perch, as well as specialized food, sanitation and medical care, just to take the immediate example. Rabbits don’t like to be held an cuddled like cats do; they’re a prey species and tend to freak out around 200-pound apex predators like humans. Ducklings and chicks grow up to be ducks and chickens, and are no longer as cute as they looked on Easter morning. Even common pets like hamsters and gerbils sometimes take up more time and effort than people are willing to expend, and wind up being abandoned. And regrettably, there’s often no way for a pet store owner to tell the difference, even if they were willing to sabotage their own business and risk destroying their family’s well-being along with the pet animals’…

So I have to ask: should pet stores be required to determine if customers can reasonably care for the animals they are buying? Should we pass more legislation governing who can purchase what kinds of animals? How do we enforce such laws and regulations if we do? And who gets to decide whether a specific pet owner is sufficiently capable of caring for a specific animal? Can we require people to take state-approved training classes before purchasing a pet – and would that help? Or should we just accept that some people can take care of a European Eagle-Owl, a mountain lion and a badger without endangering either the animals or themselves, while other people will be savaged by anything larger than a Yorkshire terrier, and just let pet lovers and business owners make their own decisions?

It’s worth thinking about…

The Ethics of Pet Liability

This week I noticed an online story about a family whose dog had been hit by a car and killed, who were now being billed by the driver’s insurance company to recover the cost of repairs to the car. It seems like a completely cruel and heartless thing to do, doesn’t it? People have just lost a beloved member of the family, are still trying to cope with the loss, and then they get hit with a bill for the damage caused during the accident. Certainly, that’s how the case is being portrayed online and in the media, but then I read the rest of the story and discovered that the family would routinely let their dog wander about the neighborhood alone and unsupervised, and that the community where all of this happened does have a lease law, and I had to admit that, as usual, the situation isn’t quite as simple as headline writers or Internet wags would have you think…

First of all, it’s not as if the driver who actually hit the animal is turning around and asking for money. The motorist reported the accident and called on their insurance company to pay for fixing the car, just as you’d expect. Second, the insurance company has a responsibility to its owners (or stockholders, if it’s a publicly-traded company) to contain costs as much as possible; they are therefore quite reasonably asking the people whose actions caused the loss to pay for the cost of making things whole again. Without a court judgment the insurance company can’t force the family to pay them anything – and it’s debatable if the company will actually file suit, since this would be a small claims action. Until they do, this isn’t a legal demand; it’s just a request to fix something you broke…

And we should remember that the family did cause the accident. Even if there was no law against letting your dog run free on the books in their community – and there was – most people who’ve ever seen one know that dogs will sometimes run into traffic if you don’t stop them. Letting your dog run around the neighborhood whenever it wants to, however quaint and charming that might sound, means that there is a non-zero chance that one day somebody is going to hit it. The family in this story knew about that possibility and continued to let their dog roam freely anyway…

So there’s no question that the company has a legal right to do what they are doing; they do in fact have a fiduciary responsibility to take these actions. The question is, should they refrain from doing so in order to spare the family additional grief and sorrow (and possibly guilt) from having allowed their pet to wander into harm’s way? Does whatever responsibility the company might have to people who are not their customers (and did cause the situation through simple negligence) on the basis of their shared humanity over-rule their responsibility to their customers (to keep prices low) and their stockholders (to maximize profit)? Does the fact that the family was both willfully careless and knowingly in violation of municipal law negate their entitlement to humane treatment? Should the company absorb the cost of the repair rather than risk potential fallout from dog-lovers and libertarians who think dogs should be allowed to run free, or would doing so simply encourage more people to let their pets roam into traffic?

It’s worth thinking about…