So for those who pay any attention to this series (and even to those who don’t, which is the great majority of DK), are any of you wondering if 3CM is scraping the bottom of the barrel for ideas for this SNLC, by resorting to that old stand-by of a pootie diary? (He’s done this before.) Well, maybe, but there is sort of a cute theme behind this SNLC, related to this establishment, which opened, as luck would have it, in November 2016. Of course, Mauhaus Café and its owners have done more good for the world than all the fools who effed the world that month in the latter’s whole lives, collectively. Since it’s been over a year, why is 3CM the loser writing about it now? The reason is that this week marks a milestone for cat adoptions from Mauhaus, namely, # 100.
Mauhaus posts pretty assiduously on the main social media outlets, where they pretty much use the same captions and pictures on all of them. (Makes sense, as there’s no point in reinventing the wheel, so to speak.) Self the loser tends to follow their Instagram feed among the various social media options, FWIW. Every time a cat gets adopted, Mauhaus posts pictured of said kitteh, and usually accompanying pictures of their new human(s). (No, self the loser is not among the adopters.) Here are the monthly stats for those 100 adoptions from Mauhaus:
November 2016 = 4
December 2016 = 5
January 2017 = 5
February 2017 = 6
March 2017 = 2
April 2017 = 6
May 2017 = 9
June 2017 = 4
July 2017 = 7
August 2017 = 4
September 2017 = 8
October 2017 = 5
November 2017 = 4
December 2017 = 5
January 2018 = 5
February 2018 = 13
March 2018 = 8
This commentary from Sarah Fenske in the Riverfront Times this week notes the 100th adoption from Mauhaus, including a chat with one of the co-owners of the café, Ben Triola. There’s this interesting bit about how he doesn’t want Mauhaus to be an adoption mill (so to speak)
"Our cat manager is already very, very selective. We don't just adopt cats willy-nilly. You'll see cat cafes open far less than a year who've adopted more than 100 cats. But we don't do same-day adoptions, and we do background checks. You have to be a pretty awesome person to get one of our cats. And being that this is our manager's favorite cat ... we're confident she's going to a truly awesome home."
Several other cats have stayed in the café quite a while, even up to 9 months, prior to being adopted. The 100th adoption, Inca, was a 9-month resident. This makes me wonder about those earlier cats in similar situations at Mauhaus, if they lingered because there wasn’t the right chemistry with the right human, or whether the owners weren’t quite ready to let them go. However, the idea of background checks on potential adopters makes sense, kind of like screening prospective tenants if you’re a landlord, since no one involved wants any of the cats to go to unsuitable people or homes.
Part of me wonders, though, if it might do more good for more cats for things to turn over just a teeny bit quicker, since, as Fenske’s article notes:
‘All the cats they adopt out come from Stray Haven Rescue, Triola says. And Stray Haven adopts all its cats from kill shelters. [Triola] says, "These are cats who are literally next in line to be killed. They get a second chance because Stray Haven chooses them."’
You see my point, namely that even though this is just one outlet for stray cats for Stray Haven to use, a faster adoption rate from Mauhaus might help to save that many more cats. But it’s Mauhaus’ business model, of course, and they’re free to make it as they wish. It’s clearly worked, in terms of attention.
It also should be noted that unlike local cat rescue organizations like Stray Haven, Tenth Life (the first cat rescue organization that Mauhaus worked with), Animal House, or the MO Humane Society, Mauhaus Café is, first and foremost, a for-profit business. So any marketing that they can do to promote their brand is key, even granted the almost taken-for-granted interest in cats from a subset of the human population. The most recent example of such marketing is an obvious one, namely a photo book on the 1st 100 cat adoptions, with an Instagram post about it here. I have no doubt that it will sell like hotcakes.
Based on reading various Instagramposts, Mauhaus has encountered stumbles and growing pains, like concerns over people buying food at the café just to make the quota on the cover charge and then pitching food, and then switching from Tenth Life over to Stray Haven apparently because cats were getting adopted rather too quickly for Tenth Life to keep up. (Tenth Life doesn’t have a full-scale shelter like Animal House.) But anything that’s a fundamentally happy story like this deserves to keep going. It’ll be interesting to see how long Mauhaus keeps going, not least to see how long it will take for another 100 cats to be adopted. If we all last that long, we shall see.
With that, time for the standard SNLC protocol, namely your loser stories for the week, with or without cats…..