A spikey success?
Bored of cat cafes? Get your weird café fix from the next best thing – hedgehogs.. . Words Tegan Chapman
As travelling goes, it seems it’s no longer enough to just go off the beaten track and explore somewhere new - we seem to be looking for increasingly quirky, unusual travel experiences to regale our friends with back home. And what better odd anecdote to help you be the envy of all your mates than a trip to a one-of- a-kind animal café? A mere few years ago we all thought it was enough for a café to just serve us our favourite drinks and maybe a slice of cake or two, with a comfy seat on which to sit and enjoy them. But we were wrong. It turns out we needed cats to make our café-going experience complete. Obviously. Since then cafés decked out with felines have become a common sight across the world – including the UK – and Tokyo alone is home to some 58 cat cafes at the last count. Now it seems we’ve tired of being able to play with household pets while quaffing our pumpkin spiced latte, and we’re looking to take things to do the next level. So those clever entrepreneurs have gone the extra mile to open a hedgehog café to cater for the weird whims of café goers heading to Tokyo’s Roppongi district. You heard me right. Hedgehogs. We’re done with cute, cuddly kittens, and now we’ve moved on to prickly hedgehogs. Harry – which is a play on the Japa-
nese word for hedgehog – offers you the chance to pet a variety of different hedgehogs in the comfy surroundings of a café. Or so they say. And since it opened its doors in April, there’s been a steady stream of visitors – both travellers and locals – to have a cuddle with a prickly critter. I was one of those. And I’m still not sure if it was one of the coolest things I’ve done or one of the most bizarre, but while in Tokyo, for my birthday I decided to subject my fellow travelling companions to a nice drink in a hedgehog café. We booked ahead for 2000 yen each (about £15), which gave us a full hour of hedgehog hilarity. We took a seat and read some instructions on how to hold a hedgehog – essentially cup it and wait for it to look at you and then you can stroke it for as long as it is happy for you to do so. On top of that you can shell out a little more for some meal worms which you can feed your chosen hedgehogs. We each pointed to the hedgehog we wanted to hold out of the 20 or so on offer, and were given it in a box to pet until we had enough of it and could then switch to a different one. Between us we went through a good few hedgehogs – some were keener than others to be handled, and only one decided he’d had enough and tried to bite. The good news is that we didn’t get
fleas, and we held some pretty cool hedgehogs. Which is something I’ve not done before. Aside from the animal welfare issues that have been raised since it opened – it’s essentially a pet shop where you can buy the creatures for quite large sums of money, so this is perhaps not quite as big an issue as some people might have you believe – my main qualm is with the premise. For one - it’s not a café. Seriously. You could ‘help yourself’ to water in a tea cup round the corner from where you sit and hold your array of hedgehogs, but essentially, you’re paying a fee to sit in a pet shop and stroke sleeping hedgehogs. So yes, while it’s cool, quirky and unique, I’m still unsure if it was actually good or not. Although at the time I was definitely excited to be holding an albino hedgehog. The next time you’re sitting on a comfy chair sipping your double shot caramel macchiato, just think, in a few months’ time you could be joined by a hedgehog...