Canada’s first-ever bunny café has been such a big hit in Vancouver it’s being held over until Dec. 30.
Catfe, Vancouver’s cat café, earlier this month teamed up with Rabbitats Rescue Society to host a pop-up bunny café featuring a cast of adorable, and adoptable, pet rabbits. And it’s been such a hopping success that the “Meet ‘n’ Treat” event is being held over until Dec. 30 from noon to 5 p.m. daily.
“I was apprehensive at first because I thought the bunnies might be nervous,” Catfe owner Michelle Furbacher said in a press release, “but these guys are quite social! They’re very curious and interactive with the guests, and they have little private house enclosures to go chill in whenever they feel like it.”
Catfe opened three years ago on the second floor of International Village Mall near Chinatown. It’s the city’s first, and only, cat café and features cat-themed beverages, snacks and merchandise, as well as a dozen or so adoptable cats from the BC SPCA. Occasionally Catfe runs out of cats, which was the case last week when the café invited Rabbitats to come in with some bunnies.
There are about two dozen bunnies on site. Visitors pay by donation to Rabbitats and are given a couple treats — kale, cilantro and other greens, and a little apple at the end of the day — to feed the rabbits.
Rabbitats founder Sorelle Saidman said she hopes events like this will help position the region’s many abandoned domestic rabbits, and their feral offspring, as an attraction and not a pest.
“The rabbits are great fun to watch,” she said. “If the loose bunnies can be trapped, spayed and neutered and released into spiffed up, secure enclosures, they will be safe and out of the environment and people will come to see them. It’s a great attraction for farm markets, parks, institutions and other businesses. They would do well to host some rabbits.”
Reservations can be made at www.catfe.ca/reservations.
