The Dark Reality Behind Bali’s “World-Famous” Cat-Poo Coffee
If you’ve never heard of civet coffee, you’re not alone. Most people haven’t. It occasionally surfaces as a novelty fact, “there’s a coffee made from beans an animal poos out”, and then disappears back into the trivia drawer. It’s the kind of thing people mention at dinner parties without ever questioning where it comes from or who pays the real price for it. But civet coffee isn’t a quirky tradition or a harmless cultural oddity. It’s an industry built on capturing wild animals, locking them in cages, and calling it tourism.
Let’s break it down from the beginning.
So what is civet coffee?
Civet coffee, sometimes branded as kopi luwak, comes from coffee beans that have passed through the digestive system of a civet. A civet is a small, shy, nocturnal mammal who wants cover, darkness, space and autonomy. In nature, they roam for kilometres at night, eating fruit, insects and the occasional small vertebrate. The original method was simple: A wild civet wanders through a coffee plantation, eats a ripe coffee cherry, digests the pulp, excretes the bean, and somebody collects the scat later. No cages, no trade, no animals harmed. That version still circulates in marketing materials.
But that version does not, and cannot, supply a global luxury market.
The real industry: cages, markets, and captivity
To meet demand, civet coffee has shifted from “collected droppings in the forest” to “wild animals captured and kept in cages so tourists can watch them digest.” The industry now depends on two things:
Wildlife markets, where civets are openly sold like commodities.
Tourism plantations, where civets are put on display and used as coffee-production props.
Researchers visited 29 of these plantations in Bali, the heart of civet tourism, and surveyed eight wildlife markets that supply them. The findings were not a glitch in the system. They are the system.
Step 1: Capture
Despite there being a legal quota of just 25 civets allowed to be sold across Indonesia in an entire year, the markets were shifting 400 to 800 a year, from just a small handful of markets.
83% percent of civets for sale were young. All were wild-caught.
This is how civet coffee begins: a wild animal dragged into a trade network that shouldn’t exist.
Step 2: Markets
Conditions in wildlife markets were catastrophic:
Average welfare score: 0.55 out of 4
Over 90% of civets had none of the basic freedoms like shelter, water, mobility or the ability to hide
Only 15% had water
Many were kept on metal-bar floors in direct sunlight, next to roads and loud crowds
Mobility scored zero for every single civet
Their body condition scores, basically their weight relative to health, matched wild civets. Not because they’re thriving. Because they’ve only just been kidnapped from the wild and haven’t yet had time to deteriorate. This is the supply chain tourists never see.
Step 3: Tourism plantations
Most tourists first encounter civet coffee in Bali’s “agrotourism plantations”, idyllic-looking walk-through facilities with coffee tastings, plants, and a few civets in cages to “explain the process.”
Researchers documented 99 civets across these plantations. They aren’t there for conservation. They’re there to legitimise a product. Welfare scoring exposed the reality:
Average husbandry score: 2.2 out of 4
0% of civets received all Four Freedoms
77% received only two
Some were so obese they scored 9 out of 9 on the body condition scale
Cages were typically small, barren, with metal bar flooring
Civets are fed an unnatural diet heavy in coffee cherries, bananas, papaya, rice and milk
Most had nowhere to hide from sun, rain or tourists
The civets who couldn’t move much, because the cages were so small, were the fattest. Obesity wasn’t a sign of good care. It was a sign of confinement. Imagine locking a nocturnal, wide-ranging mammal in a tiny display cage and force-feeding them coffee cherries because tourists will pay to watch. That’s civet coffee.
Even the product itself doesn’t add up
Across the 29 plantations, researchers counted 446 kilos of packaged civet coffee sitting on shelves. A single civet can only produce around 9.8 kilos a year.
Do the maths:
99 civets × 9.8 kilos = 972 kilos a year max
Plantations already had nearly half that amount just sitting on shelves at one moment in time
Coffee doesn’t sit unsold for six months in a tourist hotspot
Meaning:
A lot of what is sold as “civet coffee” is either adulterated, completely fake, or produced in offsite farms tourists never see where hundreds of civets are kept in even worse conditions.
This isn’t a luxury product. It’s a wildlife trade scheme wrapped in marketing.
What civets actually are
Civets are not coffee machines. They are:
Seed dispersers, essential for forest ecology
Solitary nocturnal individuals who avoid humans
Animals with home ranges up to 3 km²
Creatures who spend their nights climbing, foraging and navigating complex environments
But in the civet coffee industry, all of that is bulldozed. Civets are turned into attractions. Into props. Into commodities. Into Instagram moments.
Their ecological role is erased. Their freedom is erased. Their individuality is erased.
There is no “ethical civet coffee”
You cannot tweak your way out of this. You cannot enlarge the cages, improve the enrichment, or create a “sanctuary model.”
The foundations of the industry are:
Capture
Trade
Confinement
A product extracted from an animal’s body
The model itself is exploitation. It is not fixable. It is the same pattern as elephant riding, tiger selfies, sloth encounters and “owl cafés.”
Wildlife turned into resources. Tourism turned into a pipeline of bodies. Suffering turned into a photo opportunity. There is no ethical version of that.
So what should happen?
If we meant it when we talk about “responsible tourism,” civet coffee would disappear tomorrow.
Enforce the laws: 25 civets legally allowed vs 800 actually sold is not a grey area, it’s lawless extraction.
Shut down civet coffee tourism as a promoted attraction.
End the normalisation of wildlife markets, which fuel the trade.
Transition entirely away from captive civet coffee and, at most, permit small-scale wild-scat collection that does not require captivity.
But none of this happens without pressure from the people enabling the market.
The truth behind your “holiday treat”
Most people drink civet coffee once. Just to say they have. Just to post a picture. Just to tick something off a list. The civet doesn’t get a once. The civet gets a lifetime. In a cage. That is the cost of a novelty drink.
Civet coffee isn’t exotic. It’s a perfect example of how easily our culture turns other animals into commodities, how quickly a living individual becomes a resource, an experience, a product. If you see civet coffee on a menu, refuse it. If you see plantations offering it, name the injustice. Tell people what it really is. A luxury brand built on a wildlife trade pipeline, powered by captivity, disguised as tourism. And the easiest way to collapse that pipeline is to walk away from the cup.