Hollywood Roaster Bans Civet Coffee After PETA Push
Mr. Kicco Coffee & Wine Agrees Not to Sell Kopi Luwak After Exposé Shows Civet Cats Are Kept in Filthy Cages for Life
For Immediate Release:
October 26, 2020
Contact:
Moira Colley 202-483-7382
Less than 48 hours after PETA supporters started contacting Mr. Kicco Coffee & Wine to ask the company to stop selling kopi luwak—a coffee sourced from the excrement of caged-for-life Asian palm civets—the store’s owner removed it from his online listings, threw out his remaining supply, and pledged never to sell it again, saying that he had been duped into thinking that it was collected harmlessly from civet cats living free in the forest.
His decision follows a recent PETA Asia video exposé revealing that civet cats are kept in small, waste-filled cages allowing them barely any room to move and are fed a diet high in coffee berries—or fed exclusively coffee beans—for kopi luwak, which is sold to tourists in cafés around the world for up to $80 per cup.
“No cup of coffee is worth trapping a sensitive animal in a filthy cage and depriving them of a life,” says PETA President Ingrid Newkirk. “PETA urges all coffee drinkers to reject cruelty to animals by rejecting kopi luwak.”
The kopi luwak industry also presents a pandemic risk: Caging animals amid their own waste—which subjects them to stress and suppresses their immune system—creates a breeding ground for zoonotic diseases. SARS jumped from civet cats to humans, and it’s also thought that civet cats may have been an intermediary vector for the novel coronavirus. 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 other way”—opposes speciesism, a human-supremacist worldview. For more information, please visit PETA.org or follow the group on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram.
