Patriot Pawsabilities, a cat lounge at University Mall in Fairfax, recently celebrated its 1,000th adoption since opening in March 2019.
Owner Monique Ryan said she didn’t have a specific target in mind when she first opened the cat cafe in 2019, but it was a welcome milestone.
“I just wanted to get as many cats in forever homes as I could,” Ryan said. “If that’s going to be 1,000 or 10,000, it really didn’t matter.”
Ryan said the achievement occurred sometime around last Thursday (Nov. 20), and the cafe’s website indicates there have been three more adoptions since.
The Braddock Road storefront near George Mason University’s Fairfax campus shelters a lively cat community, with up to 35 cats and 20 kittens at any given time. Several videos on their social media show the cats sitting in cardboard boxes, up on perches and playing with one another.
Ryan said the initial inspiration for a Northern Virginia cat cafe came after her family was stationed in Korea; both she and her husband were active-duty military service members for decades.
“We had been to a cat cafe over there. In my mind, I was thinking, ‘I could possibly do something like that,'” Ryan said. “In the Asian countries, most of the cats belong to the cat cafe, and they’re not adoptable. Here in the U.S., when they started opening cat cafes, they were used to get cats adopted.”
She acknowledged that traditional adoption events aren’t always the best avenue for connecting cats with their forever homes.
“Prior to that, cats would be at an adoption event, scared to death, sitting in little cages, oftentimes at the same time that they had the dog adoption event. These poor cats were just terrified the whole time,” Ryan said. “[Opening Patriot Pawsabilities] made just so much sense to me, and we didn’t need an income. I had my retirement. [My husband] was working a second job, so I decided to just go for it.”
The cafe is strategically placed. Ryan said she was inspired to establish the cats’ home near George Mason University because she saw how loneliness affects college-aged students.
“I knew the year that I was going to open was the year that my oldest was going to college, and they were just having a really, really hard time thinking of not being able to be with their cat,” Ryan recalled. “I was like, ‘I need to make sure that I’m near a college somewhere, so if they’re missing their cat at home, they can come visit the ones that we have at the lounge.’ And it’s great for the cats for socialization.”
Ryan said she’s seen the impact a cat cafe can have on a cat who may be shy, older, disabled or more antisocial.
“To take a cat like that, that’s just shut down, scared, just not doing well at all, and then taking them and putting them in the lounge,” she said, “it takes every cat a little bit of a different period of time.”
Anyone who knows cats knows it takes them time to warm up to about anybody, and that’s no different in a room full of other cats.
“We’ve got a lot of high arches, so the cats will be hiding — and we don’t force anything — so they’ll be hiding up high somewhere. After a while, they get curious, and they start looking down, and then while they’re looking down, they’ll notice that the other cats are playing, there’s toys and they’re getting pets and everything,” Ryan said. “Eventually they’ll start coming down just because they want to play … When you see that light go on and they come down for the first time, that’s just so rewarding. It’s the best thing ever.”
Ryan said she’s not sure what’s up next for Patriot Pawsabilities, now in its sixth year. At 61, she hopes to fully retire at some point, but is looking at expanding or providing boarding.
“I don’t know yet how that’s going to look. The economy has hit us really, really hard [with] so many government employees around us, so that kind of makes you a little bit nervous to expand,” Ryan acknowledged. “I’d like to do another 1,000 adoptions. That’d be nice.”
