Harrods Makes Humane Choice on Civet Coffee

Iconic department store Harrods has withdrawn kopi luwak coffee from its stores after revelations about the trade’s cruel treatment of animals and the widespread mislabelling of coffee beans as “wild-sourced”, when they may in fact have come from caged animals.

Kopi luwak, or civet coffee, is made from coffee berries that have been eaten and then excreted by Asian palm civets. It’s a truly bizarre phenomenon – and truly horrible for the animals involved, who are often captured from the wild, kept in tiny cages and forced to eat unnatural amounts of the ripe berries.

This welcome decision by Harrods comes just weeks after these shocking welfare conditions came to light as a result of reports in The Guardian and on the BBC, pressure from animal protection groups and undercover video footage released by PETA Asia-Pacific.

While our friends over at PETA US are campaigning to get Amazon.com to drop the crappy coffee, thousands of concerned people in the UK have pledged that they would never buy this perverse product. If you haven’t already, sign the pledge and let us know if you spot any retailers with kopi luwak on their shelves.

Here in the UK, please also take action against another long-established department store which has so far failed to ditch a product proved to be cruel – send a message to Fortnum & Mason asking it to stop selling unethical foie gras made from the grotesquely enlarged livers of force-fed geese.