The East India Company Bans Civet Coffee After PETA Push

The East India Company Bans Civet Coffee After PETA Push

London – After hearing from PETA, The East India Company, a boutique known for selling exclusive and exotic ingredients, agreed to stop the sale of kopi luwak, a coffee sourced from the excrement of Asian palm civets who are caged for life.

The decision follows a recent revealing that civet cats in Bali, Indonesia, are kept in small, waste-filled cages with barely any room to move around. Many had open wounds or exhibited stereotypic behaviour indicative of extreme stress, such as pacing constantly. Civet cats are fed a diet high in – or exclusively made up of – coffee berries for kopi luwak, which is made from the animals’ faeces and sold to tourists in cafés around the world for up to £60 per cup.

“No cup of coffee is worth trapping a sensitive animal in a filthy cage and forcing them to endure physical deprivation and psychological torment,” says PETA Senior Corporate Liaison Dr Carys Bennett. “PETA commends The East India Company for taking this vile product off their shelves and urges all coffee drinkers to reject cruelty to animals by never buying kopi luwak.”

The kopi luwak industry also presents a pandemic risk: caging animals amid their own waste subjects them to stress, suppresses their immune system, and creates a breeding ground for zoonotic diseases. Severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS-CoV) jumped from civet cats to humans. Civet cats who are no longer useful to the kopi luwak industry are sometimes sold to live-animal markets like the one where the novel coronavirus is believed to have originated.

PETA – whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to eat or 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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