Tourists across the globe rely on online review websites to make informed travel decisions. As the largest travel review site in the world, TripAdvisor boast more than 460 million site visitors per month- each hoping to make the most of their travel experience. Yet TripAdvisor is not responsibly informing tourists about the animal attractions that actively breach their own animal welfare policy.

TripAdvisor must adhere to its own animal welfare policy by issuing a welfare warning for all civet coffee attractions on their platform.

Civets are shy, solitary, nocturnal animals. Civet Coffee (also known locally as kopi luwak, cà phê chồn, or weasel coffee) is produced by holding wild caught civets in small, dirty, exposed, often rusty steel cages where the animals are fed a diet largely of coffee berries. The partly digested berry is collected from the animals faeces and then ground up to produce the world’s most expensive coffee. A luxury, socially promoted, high priced product that results from an industry based on severely compromised animal welfare and unsustainable wildlife extraction.

By visiting civet coffee attractions, tourists are unwittingly contributing to an animal welfare, conservation and human health crisis.

Civets are routinely captured from the wild in numbers that are significantly impacting local forest ecosystems. These animals have a critical role in the wild as both predators and seed dispersal agents. Capture methods, including trapping and snaring, are indiscriminate and cruel. As a result, captured civets commonly suffer significant bodily injury including lacerations and severed limbs.

Civets held in these ‘attractions’ experience psychological trauma, pain, malnutrition and disease. They are routinely displayed without adequate shelter, balanced nutrition, access to water or veterinary attention. They die prematurely. These conditions place civets, their handlers, and tourists at risk of zoonotic disease, most especially when civets are handled. Evidence, obtained from Tripadvisor reports, shows that Civets in Civet Coffee ‘attractions’ are regularly sedated to allow their safe handling as photo-props for tourists to pose with. 

Tourists can only make informed (welfare wise) decisions if they are appropriately informed to begin with. 

We are calling on TripAdvisor to actively discourage visitation to any destination connected to the ‘Civet Coffee’ trade. The conditions under which civets are kept for the production of this product are clearly in contravention of TripAdvisor’s own animal welfare policies. 

Recent compelling scientific evidence shows that the welfare of these animals cannot in any way be met in attractions which produce and sell ‘Civet Coffee’ - why then, are TripAdvisor not informing their 460 million monthly visitors of the welfare violations intrinsic to this cruel industry?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Learn more by watching our civet coffee tourism documentary: www.thecivetproject.com/documentary