Are pet cafes a torturous ordeal for pets?
While a relaxing experience for many of us, pet cafes have become a terrifying experience for many of the cafes’ animals as café owners exploit them to turn a bigger profit.
Many pet lovers are unable to own pets for a variety of reasons. Hence, they visit Pet Cafes to fulfil their desire to interact with pets that they like. Furthermore, for many, going to pet cafes is a great way to relax and relieve stress.
Pet cafes are not a new concept. As early as 1998, Taiwan opened the world’s first cat café. For more than two decades, cat cafe culture spread rapidly in Southeast Asia and then blossomed all over Europe and the United States.
In 2011, the Chinese mainland’s first cat cafe was born in Guangzhou, and cat cafes soon became very popular in China. Today, there are currently more than 3000 cat cafes in the country.
To fulfil consumers’ endless demands for more pets, an increasing number of pets and exotic animals have become commodities for customers to enjoy, with dogs, rabbits, and even pigs and alpacas being common household pets in other countries. A variety of exotic animals have also been roped into the pet café scene: there are owl-themed cafes in Japan; a restaurant in Dalian, China, that keeps beluga whales; and a “small zoo coffee shop” in Thailand, which includes all kinds of animals, from raccoons and North American prairie rats to macaques, chinchillas, hairless guinea pigs and South African parrots.
Pet cafes have continued springing up, prompting other service providers such as nail salons, beauty salons, and hotels to follow suit, keeping a few pets in a small part of the store to attract animal lovers to spend more.
Does the Pet Cafe Really Make Money?
Due to the high demand for pets, many pet lovers are very optimistic about pet-related industries. According to the 2021 White Paper on Pet Consumption Trends in China, the market size of China’s pet industry will reach nearly US$46.9 billion (RMB300 billion) in 2020 and will reach US$69.7 billion (RMB445.6 billion) by 2023. Many pet lovers cannot keep pets at home because of cost, time, environment, but they are eager to meet and connect with pets. Thus, many pet lovers believe that opening a pet café is a promising business idea as it does not require a significant amount of technical knowledge. Still, they can make money and get to spend more time with pets. Let’s look at whether pet cafes are a profitable investment for café owners.
One might think that running a pet café seems like it only entails keeping a few pets. However, in reality, this is not as easy as it looks. The continuation of the Covid-19 outbreak added to the financial pressures, making it even more challenging to survive. Many pet restaurants have closed less than a year after opening or have survived by providing another service to customers to draw them into the shop.
To survive in the pet café industry, finding the right business model is key. Most pet cafes in China offer customers the experience of interacting with their pets while also functioning as a restaurant, offering both food and beverages onsite. Their operating costs are mainly concentrated in three aspects: rent, water, electricity, other property expenses, pet maintenance costs, and catering costs.
In terms of property expenses, it is difficult to strike an optimal balance between the space allocated for the animals and the space that serves as consumer dining areas. If the animals are given ample room to move, the consumer dining areas would be minimal. Hence, there is a tradeoff: Maximizing the consumer’s experience would compromise the animals’ living space. To ensure that they can get a constant flow of customers, most pet cafes are located near the subway entrance or large commercial super and other places with high traffic, causing their rental to be high. For example, in Sanlitun, Beijing, a square meter of rent ranges from US$57.8 (RMB370) to US$187.6 (RMB1200) per month. Hence, it is difficult for a pet café to find a well-located, spacious venue that is large enough to satisfy the spatial needs of both the consumers and the pets, as it is bound to be expensive to rent.
Next, a sizeable portion of pet cafes’ expenses also comes from the daily maintenance of pets. To attract customers, many restaurants choose expensive pets, which means they are costly to purchase and cost a great deal to maintain daily.
Lastly, the food and beverage costs constitute the smallest proportion of a pet café’s expenses. Due to limitations regarding venue and hygiene issues, most pet restaurants offer only coffee, milk tea, and other beverages. They are not allowed to serve food to customers, which also limits the pet café’s income.
Hence, to make a profit, most pet restaurants impose a minimum consumption limit on their customers while ensuring that the beverages and snacks they serve are priced high enough for them to make a decent profit. Upon a quick search of the terms “cat cafe” and “dog cafe” on Meituan, the results show that the cost of a meal for one is approximately 50 yuan, and two meals would cost an estimated 100 yuan. Furthermore, most restaurants limit the time customers can spend in the café to increase their turnaround rates. This has also led to a decline in consumer satisfaction and a low retention rate. In addition, despite their products not being any more unique or providing any additional value, pet cafes price their products higher than others in the market.
As the live streaming industry has boomed in recent years, many pet cafe owners have tried to conduct live streams via video. However, it’s not easy for these pet café owners to get online traffic. As viewers have become increasingly picky with the content they choose to watch, pets with little speciality have a limited appeal.
Bilibili’s account “cat ignore coffee” has advised those trying to enter the business with caution. Even if he is lucky enough to have a legion of fan support, it has been video creations for years to make ends meet, not to mention that the cat cafe’s venue is under his property.
Can you only be profitable when you conduct your business unethically?
1) To increase profit, pet café owners exploit the pets without any regard for their welfare
It is impossible to sustain a pet café purely based on passion. For profit, many pet café owners choose to disregard the animals’ welfare by giving the pets insufficient living space or refusing to spend enough on the pets’ daily expenses. The pets are deliberately kept hungry to increase pet food sales and cause the pets to be more enthusiastic towards customers who visit the cafe. Some pet owners even neglect to routinely bathe the pets to save on expenses, causing some pets to have a heavy odour and compromising their health.
In these pet cafes, the environment is constantly noisy, and pets are forced to interact with the customers all day, regardless of whether they want to rest during those times. As such, many of the pets are very stressed. Cats and dogs that humans have domesticated for a long time are still uncomfortable with this over-socialization, not to mention the animals used to living in the wild. Former staff of Japan’s Owl Cafe have revealed that 30 owls have died so far, with an average of seven owls dying per year as the owls, which are accustomed to flying high, are tied to wooden frames 24 hours a day and are forced to interact with customers during the day, even though they are nocturnal and need to sleep.
Moreover, pet experience halls are used as breeding grounds to breed and sell pets for profit illegally. The absence of relevant domestic laws and regulations gives profiteers a chance to treat pets like commodities, ruthlessly abandoning them when they feel that they no longer have any value.
2) While pet welfare is a concern, it is also important to note that customers of pet cafes also face health risks
Eating with pets can cause consumers health problems, and many ordinary restaurants ban pets from entering for this reason. On online forums, many pet cafes have received poor reviews due to smell and hygiene issues. Pets inevitably carry parasites or bacteria, and humans may be infected with the disease when interacting with these pets, with this risk being unavoidable even if the pets are vaccinated. In addition, even though it is unlikely, extreme events whereby the pets attack customers can occur. This risk is exacerbated because some customers lack experience in dealing with pets, resulting in a higher probability of accidents occurring.
3) Pets are not objects, and we should treat them with caution
Pet cafes are different from ordinary restaurants in that the pet cafes need to be well-managed to ensure that the pets do not end up abandoned. As the pet café owners cannot care for so many pets after putting up their shutters, many of the pets are then abandoned or resold. Due to a sudden incident, a cat cafe shop owner in Chengdu closed for more than half a month in mid-August. Due to the failure of the part-time staff to care for the cats adequately, the cats’ living conditions became terrible, with insect infestation and excreta everywhere. The cats were malnourished, had unkempt, overgrown fur, and faced health problems. Furthermore, unsterilized cats resulted in mixed breeding, with young cats dying from malnutrition. The cats were not rescued until a neighbour called the police.
4) The standard of care that pet cafes show to their pets is entirely dependent on the café owners
In June 2018, the State Administration of Market Supervision issued the Code of Practice for Food Safety in Food Services, stipulating that “no animals such as poultry or livestock shall be kept in foodservice establishments”. However, it is difficult to define whether pet café animals are pets or livestock. Market regulators also face struggles due to the lack of detailed regulations for the emerging pet cafes. At present, the regulators follow the general management of dining establishments, with the environmental sanitation of the pet cafes left to the café owners to maintain and for customers to report if found unsatisfactory. However, due to the commercialization of these pet cafes and the owners all looking to make a profit, it is likely that many of these pet cafes do not meet the sanitation standards that they should. China still has a long way to go in ensuring that interactions between humans and animals are no longer harmful to the animals and that the animals are no longer victims of our profit-making mentalities.
