CIVET COFFEE - KOPI LUWAK

Anyone who sells civet coffee is an accessory to animal cruelty, and, in the opinion of this blogger, should be drummed out of business and run out of town. Preferably tarred and feathered first.

There is absolutely no way that kopi luwak can be ethically supplied by coffee brokers and importers, reason being that at every step from civet-poop to hermetically sealed bag, implausible deniability is rigidly maintained, by practiced dissimulation and outright lying.

It's a very straight-faced industry.

The truth is that multitudes of farms in Indonesia, the Philippines, and Vietnam, keep wild civet cats penned up in cages, fed a diet consisting primarily of coffee berries. The animals usually get sick of digestive ailments, and die well before their normal life span.

No one can make a claim that caging normally solitary animals together, in filthy and crowded coops, is in any way humane; companies that boldly assert that their civet coffee is only and entirely 'harvested' from wild civets are, without exception, thoroughly complicit in an industry sodden with cruelty.


From Wikipedia:

"Kopi luwak is produced mainly on the islands of Sumatra, Java, Bali, and Sulawesi in the Indonesian Archipelago. It is also widely gathered in the forest or produced in the farms in the islands of the Philippines (where the product is called kape motit in the Cordillera region, kape alamid in Tagalog areas, and kape melô or kape musang in Mindanao island), and in East Timor (where it is called kafé-laku). Weasel coffee is a loose English translation of its Vietnamese name cà phê Chồn, where popular, chemically simulated versions are also produced."


Okay. I have no problem boycotting imports from those places. Given that the concepts "quality control" and "product safety" are barely known there anyhow, and, seeing as far better equivalent comestibles are made elsewhere, no biggie.


Quote:
"The method of collected feces from wild civets has given way to intensive farming methods in which caged civets are force fed the coffee beans. This method of production has raised ethical concerns about the treatment of civets due to "horrific conditions" including isolation, poor diet, small cages and a high mortality rate. According to an officer from TRAFFIC, the trade in civets to make kopi luwak may constitute a significant threat to wild civet populations."

[Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kopi_Luwak.]



In short: cruelty to animals, and outright lies to the public.

What else are Indonesian, Philippino, and Vietnamese businessmen up to?

And why should you buy anything at all from those countries?


By the way, you can also get civet coffee from Amazon.
Under certain conditions, you will be "Eligible for FREE Super Saver Shipping", too!

Way to go, Amazon.



From Tony Wild, writing in the Guardian, comes this:

"Genuine Indonesian kopi luwak is collected from the droppings of a wild cat-like animal called the luwak (the common palm civet, Paraxorus Hermaphroditus), a shy, solitary nocturnal forest animal that freely prowls nearby coffee plantations at night in the harvest season, eating the choicest ripe coffee cherries. It can't digest the stones – or coffee beans – of the cherry, so craps them out along with the rest of its droppings. The beans are collected by farm workers. Cleaned and washed, they have acquired a unique and highly prized taste from their passage through the luwak's digestive tract and the anal scent glands they use for marking their territory. Being wild, hard to collect, variable in age and quality, and very rare, kopi luwak is not a commercially viable crop, but just an interesting coffee curiosity."

Read the rest of his essay here.

[ http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/wordofmouth/2013/sep/13/civet-coffee-cut-the-crap ]


"One single Indonesian farm claims to produce 7,000kg a year from 240 caged civets"


It's pretty horrifying what some merchants are willing to do to make a fast buck off dumb-ass Westerners and Japanese who don't know and don't care where their show-off luxuries come from.


Apparently, kopi luak tastes like shit.


Oprah Winfrey likes it.




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