An Outing to Cat-Friendly Bass Pro Shops

Some sporting good stores are cat-friendly, and the Bass Pro Shops chain is one of them.

I am the farthest thing from the target market for this store, since I don’t fish, hunt, or camp out. What I do is have such a small head that I wear children’s eyeglasses, and until I found the sunglasses at Bass Pro Shops, I had to find creative ways to remove cartoon characters from my sunglasses. So I visit them when I need a new pair of child-sized polarized sunglasses.

Cupcake loves coming along for the trip because there’s so much to see that is so different from her usual world.

During our first visit to the store, one of the employees excitedly told us that Cupcake was the second cat cat going places she had met in the store. The first was a bengal, also on a harness. Unfortunately, the employee didn’t know whether the bengal and its human were tourists visiting our area or whether they lived here. If they live here, we are hoping to run into them going places someday!

Cats aren’t the only animals welcome at Bass Pro Shops. Their pet friendly policies were originally for dogs. During our visit, we saw a large dog riding around the store in a shopping cart.

Every Bass Pro Shop location has  an enormous aquarium decorated to match the local environment and full of fish native to the area. Cupcake enjoyed watching the fish in the aquarium, and she seemed amazed that some of the fish were bigger than she was.

As far as I can tell, every Bass Pro Shop is decorated differently, some of it depending on where you are in the country. The store nearest us is probably a little more over the top than many since it is in a tourist destination and has to compete with everything here being really attention-grabbing.

Cupcake craned her neck looking all around when we walked through the store because she saw so many strange sights, from boats to tents.  One of the really fun pieces of decor in the store is hidden way in the back of the fishing area, where a huge replica of a shark hung like a scene from Jaws.

Cupcake wasn’t sure what to make of it at first, but after she looked at it from a few angles, she decided it wasn’t going to harm her. By the end of her time with the shark, I had to pick her up for fear she was going to try crawling inside his big mouth.

If you have a Bass Pro Shop in your city, it’s a cat-friendly location for your cat going places to visit on an outing. Have you visited one where you live?