Breaking Investigation: Suffering Civet Cats Caged for Coffee
Breaking Investigation: Suffering Civet Cats Caged for Coffee
PETA Calls On Holidaymakers Never to Buy Cruelly Obtained Kopi Luwak
London – Today, PETA Asia revealed new undercover investigative footage of Asian palm civets pacing frantically and bobbing their heads in cramped, filthy cages on Indonesian farms for kopi luwak – made from coffee cherries that the animals eat and excrete.
Indonesia is the world’s top producer of kopi luwak, and PETA Asia investigators have uncovered how the industry deliberately mislabels coffee from captive civet cats as “wild-sourced” in order to deceive consumers and retailers. One producer dismissed claims of wild sourcing as “marketing”, while another admitted to the difficulty of sourcing free-roaming civet cat faeces that contain coffee cherries. According to one worker, farmers can collect no more than 20 kilograms of faeces a year from the jungle and up to 400 kilograms a year from imprisoned, force-fed civet cats. Companies offer meaningless certificates to try to trick consumers into thinking that kopi luwak production is somehow ethical.
“Every cup of kopi luwak represents the suffering of sensitive civet cats likely driven insane inside filthy, barren cages,” says PETA Vice President of Programmes Elisa Allen. “PETA urges holidaymakers never to buy the cruelly produced coffee and to opt for one of Indonesia’s many delicious, animal-friendly options instead.”
Despite being a protected species under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, Asian palm civets are typically captured when they’re around 6 months old and given almost nothing to eat except coffee cherries to produce kopi luwak. In addition, caging animals amidst their own waste and inducing stress creates breeding grounds for zoonotic diseases. SARS, which has an estimated human fatality rate of around 15%, has spread from civet cats to humans.
PETA – whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to abuse in any way” – opposes speciesism, a human-supremacist worldview. For more information, please visit PETA.org.uk or follow the group on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram.
Contact:
Jennifer White +44 (0) 20 7837 6327; [email protected]
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