PETA Calls on Harrods to Dump Factory-Farmed Civet Coffee
PETA Calls on Harrods to Dump Factory-Farmed Civet Coffee
New Exposé Reveals Sick, Injured, and Dying Civet Cats Are Caged in Filth for Kopi Luwak
London – PETA is calling on London department store Harrods to stop selling kopi luwak – coffee obtained from civet cats’ excrement that’s sold in tourist cafés in Indonesia and exported around the world – following a new exposé revealing how animals suffer on farms in Java. Footage shows that sick Asian palm civet cats with bloody, open wounds languished inside tiny wire cages encrusted with their own faeces.
PETA Asia’s undercover investigator filmed one critically ill civet cat, who was too weak even to stand up and lying motionless in her barren, filthy cage. The investigator notified the farm’s owner, who said he wanted to “throw (the animal) away.” The investigator rushed the animal to a veterinary clinic, but the civet couldn’t be saved despite receiving intensive care.
Undercover footage also shows that one farmer even fed coffee cherries to caged, illegally held binturongs – an animal red-listed as “vulnerable” on the International Union for Conservation of Nature Red List of Threatened Species – and that the excreted cherries were labelled as civet coffee and sold.
Indonesia is the world’s top producer of kopi luwak. While the coffee is often advertised as “wild-sourced,” farmers have admitted that it would be nearly impossible to produce exclusively wild-sourced civet coffee and that the industry knowingly mislabels coffee from captive animals to deceive consumers and retailers. One farmworker even told PETA Asia’s investigator, “We label this as ‘wild,’ because even though the animals are caged now, they came from the wild.”
“Extreme suffering is widespread in the kopi luwak industry, where civet cats and even illegally captured binturongs endure filthy, miserable confinement that often leads to insanity or death,” says PETA Vice President for the UK, Europe, and Australia Mimi Bekhechi. “PETA is urging Harrods to take a stand against this horrific cruelty by refusing to sell kopi luwak and reminds shoppers never to buy it.”
Despite being a protected species under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, Asian palm civets used to produce kopi luwak are typically captured when they’re just 6 months old and given almost nothing to eat except coffee cherries. PETA notes that when animals are caged in their waste and their immune systems are suppressed because of stress, breeding grounds for zoonotic diseases are created. 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, X, TikTok, or Instagram.
Contact:
Jennifer White +44 (0) 20 7837 6327; [email protected]
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