Turns out that not everything can be turned into a ridiculous popup cafe.
London is home to a lot of strange places, like the first cereal cafe, but by far the weirdest idea for a cafe with a quirk that we'd heard of was the owl cafe which was planned to be a popup in London that would allow customers to eat and drink in the company of six owls.
It was only due to open for seven days in a secret location in Soho from March 19th, but it seems that animal rights protesters have decided that it shouldn't go ahead, and launched a rather successful petition online.
Owners of Annie the Owl Cafe (we know, they chose not to call it The Hootenanny, which is worthy of a protest on its own) had stated that all necessary precautions had been taken to ensure the safety of the animals and that trained falconers would be on hand to supervise, but the campaigners still said that the event was cruel.
Sarah Stafford, one of the petitioners on Change.org said "It is one thing to raise awareness of owls and the help that they might need to thrive in the wild, but it is quite another to tether them up in a cocktail bar and have people touching them and handling them. Five owls working for 6 hours over 7 nights for public entertainment and money making is downright unfair and cruel, if that’s the way to spread a message of conservation, I’d rather not have it spread".
At the time of writing over 24,000 people have signed the petition to stop the popup opening its doors to the public, and the Barn Owl Centre charity that had been backing project have decided to pull out as a result of the bad press.
Other possible names that we had suggested for the venue were 'The Night Owl', 'Hoot's the Boss?', 'On a Wing and a Prayer' and 'Strigine Quartet', but we were shouted down at the Press Club.
Via i100
