Kopi luwak aficionados pay a premium for the privilege of drinking the brew.
Kopi luwak is the most expensive beverage in the world and a testament to how pretentious people can be about things labeled exotic, wild or rare.
Developing a taste for the coffee, which hails from Indonesia, means taking on a costly vice: “farm-harvested” kopi luwak beans can go for more than $100 per pound, while beans supposedly harvested from the wild can fetch more than $1,000 per pound.
All for a beverage made from coffee beans eaten and shat out by civet cats.
Aficionados claim the beans undergo a partial fermentation process as they travel the animal’s digestive track, breaking down certain proteins in a process said to reduce acidity. The beans are ejected in fecal logs, which are “harvested,” washed and packaged for sale. (That’s right. Your kopi luwak arrives in authentic segments of constipatory excreta, certifying freshness!)
Fecal perfection: kopi luwak is harvested from palm civet turds.
The result, kopi luwak fans claim, is a smoother, smokier, chocolatey brew.
Others disagree.
Kopi luwak tastes like “[p]etrified dinosaur droppings steeped in bathtub water,” a Washington Post writer sniffed, while others insist there’s no meaningful difference compared to most coffee.
Besides the disagreement over the flavor of kopi luwak, there are major ethical issues and the potential for disease transmission vectors.
Civet cats aren’t true cats. The Asian palm civet, which is the species used for kopi luwak, is a viverred and is closely related to genets and oyan, which are ferret-like small carnivores.
In plain terms, it’s a feliform animal that shares ancestry with felids and looks like a cross between a cat and a mongoose, but it is distinct from the familiar felidae family we’re all familiar with. Feliform simply means animals with cat-like body plans.
It’s also a wild animal, and the lucrative kopi luwak market has led to widespread exploitation of the civets. The animals, who are highly mobile and curious, are slotted into battery cages, stuffed with cherry coffee beans, and exist as living food processors for Indonesia’s coffee industry.
A palm civet in a small, filthy cage in a kopi luwak facility. Credit: Wikipedia Commons
In a country known for exploited “dancing monkeys” (topeng monyet), and the destruction of species like the orangutan via the ruthless destruction of irreplaceable old growth jungle, animal rights are way down on the list of priorities.
Buying kopi luwak fuels the industry and perpetuates the cycle of bean harvesters stealing young civets from the wild and subjecting them to miserable lives in cages where they can barely move.
So if you’re the adventurous type who is normally game for unconventional food and drink, you might want to sit this one out and have a cup of Folgers instead.
Lauren Carter admitted she poured bleach on cat food on two occasions in April, police say.
The video shows a woman stop her car, get out holding a bottle of what looks like bleach, and pour the substance onto food left for outdoor cats while a tabby looks on, sniffing curiously.
The footage was recorded by a family in Chester, Pa., a town of 32,000 about 25 miles southwest of Philadelpia. The cat, Jumper, belongs to a family on the same street.
The suspect’s name had been floating around on various cat-related social media sites along with the video for weeks, but police and prosecutors had to be sure of the facts before they arrested the woman.
When lab results showed the substance was indeed bleach, officers arrested 35-year-old Lauren Carter, also of Chester.
Cops and the SPCA’s law enforcement division say Carter admitted to pouring bleach on cat food on two occasions in April. It isn’t clear why Carter wanted to harm cats, and so far law enforcement hasn’t made any comments about her motivation.
They did, however, make sure local pets did not eat the poisoned food.
“We do believe based on our investigation that no animals did consume the food,” SPCA spokeswoman Gillian Kocher told KYW, a local news radio station. “Our officers went out through the area to make sure that no animals were sick or deceased, but it is, of course, our intention that this doesn’t happen again, and the animals in the neighborhood are kept safe.”
Carter has been charged with two counts of misdemeanor animal cruelty.
Olivia Oliver, Jumper’s caretaker, said she was satisfied with the outcome of the investigation and Carter’s confession.
“I think it’s enough. I think it’s a good sign; it’s a warning for her,” Oliver told WPVI, the Philadelphia-based ABC news affiliate. “And basically, I’m glad she’s going to pay for what she did. And hopefully nothing like this happens again around here.”
A Kardashian admitted she had her cats declawed, but wouldn’t take responsibility. People who are thinking of adopting should know declawing is mutilation and makes cats miserable.
Khloe Kardashian says she regrets having her cats declawed, admitting on her podcast this week that the kitties are “miserable” since she had them mutilated.
But she stopped short of taking responsibility, electing to blame an unnamed party for allegedly telling her it was okay to have her cats’ toes amputated at the first knuckle.
“I was really misadvised about getting my cats declawed. I’ve never owned cats before. I didn’t even know that was a thing. I feel really, really terrible that I did go in this direction,” Kardashian said.
Look, I get it. Learning stuff is, like, hard. If only someone would invent a worldwide network, an “internet” if you will, where one might access the entire sum of human knowledge with but a few keystrokes!
In the absence of such a miraculous technology, how are we to know that chopping off a cat’s toes will cause them a lifetime of pain and discomfort?
Credit: Instagram
Sarcasm aside, I’m not interested in going on at length about the Kardashians or litigating this decision online. Plenty of people are doing that. There’s really no point.
What I am concerned about is the unfortunate fact that the Kardashians have influence.
Because Kardashian isn’t taking responsibility, and she brought up her decision to declaw her cats in the context of her feelings and her regret, she is not effectively communicating why declawing is wrong, nor what it does to cats.
If you don’t know what it is, you should know declawing is mutilation. It is the amputation of your cat’s toes at the first knuckle.
It permanently changes a cat’s gait, leading to early onset arthritis. It makes simple tasks like walking and using the litter box painful.
It causes psychological problems because claws are a cat’s first and primary defense. Without them, cats feel vulnerable. That can manifest in several different ways, leading them to become fearful, or to become quick to bite because they have no other options.
Khloe Kardashian was previously caught “face tuning” her cats, meaning she applied filters to them to make them look different.
Declawing is cruel, barbaric and has no place in a civilized society. It is illegal in most of the world, and US states are finally joining civilization with laws banning the procedure. Kardashian lives in California, where it is banned, so presumably she had it done before the ban or despite it. If it’s the latter, the chances of her facing legal consequences are slim to none.
If you’re worried about protecting furniture, there are much better options, but you should also know cats have normal behaviors that don’t always align with the concept of a perfectly-kept house. Your cat will test boundaries, throw up when she’s had too much food too fast, knock things over, get into places you never thought he’d get into, cough up hairballs and more.
You will be surprised. Things will be broken.
But that’s part of the feline appeal: they’re curious, playful animals, and you have to earn their trust. Once you do, they’ll be your pals for life — and you don’t want to betray that trust by making life miserable for them.
The footballer stars in a TV series that calls cats “unwanted ecological trash” that can be repurposed as “culinary gold.” One cast member claims eating felines is a heroic endeavor: “In some cases you should and could eat it into eradication.”
Earlier this week we noted an Australian celebrity chef’s enthusiasm for eating a “pussycat sandwich,” but Maggie Beer isn’t the only famous Aussie who has raved about eating cats.
An Australian football (soccer) player, Tony Armstrong, spoke in glowing terms about eating cat meat in an interview with The Guardian a year ago, enthusing that it was “the yummiest.”
“We had it in the Western Desert and cooked it in a fire, wrapped in foil,” Armstrong told the newspaper. “It was like the most delicious rotisserie chicken I’ve ever had.”
Armstrong’s interviewer, Sian Cain, the Guardian’s deputy culture editor for Australia, didn’t bat an eye or consider the answer worthy of a follow-up question. She just moved on, asking him if rising early for “breakfast telly” was as difficult as keeping in shape for football.
Armstrong consumed the cat meat for his television show, Eat The Invaders, which casts it as an attempt to “turn our unwanted ecological trash into desirable culinary gold.”
That’s what the life of a cat is casually referred to in certain mainstream segments of Australian culture: “unwanted ecological trash.”
Armstrong and his castmates say they’re on a noble quest to eradicate invasive species by eating them.
As we noted in our post about Beer’s “pussycat sandwich,” the casual way this is talked about in Australia provides a window into the way some people there think about animal life in general and felines in particular.
Not all of them, of course. There are lots of people for whom the idea of eating intelligent companion animals is extremely disturbing. But the idea is widespread enough to make it onto mainstream Australian television without much of an uproar, undoubtedly because Australians are constantly told felines — not industrialization, pollution, pesticides, traffic collisions, man-made environmental hazards, and habitat loss — are almost solely responsible for declining populations of native fauna.
When the choice is between modifying our own behavior or blaming animals who cannot speak for themselves, it’s always easier to shift the blame than to, say, derail development projects or outlaw the use of harmful chemicals.
Just look at the decades-long controversy involving the weedkiller Roundup despite the damage it does to other plants, animals and the people working directly with the substance. Despite successful lawsuits on behalf of cancer patients and evidence that chemicals in the herbicide cause cancer, the EPA says it’s safe. Roundup and other glyphosate-based herbicides are widely used in Australia as well, but that fact is rarely raised in discussions about protecting native fauna and flora.
In a promo for Eating the Invaders, after blaming “colonial ancestors” for introducing non-native species and repeating the claim that cats kill 3 billion animals per year in Australia (an assertion for which there is no evidence), Armstrong casts himself as a crusader righting ecological wrongs.
“But what if we could help,” he asks in a voiceover, “by reimagining this problem as a tasty solution?”
In the series, Armstrong works with chef Vince Trim and “artist and curator” Kirsha Kaechele, who credits herself with staging “immersive feasts [that] transform invasive species into art.”
Armstrong, Kaechele and Trim. Credit: Eat The Invaders
Kaechele says she has no qualms about eating intelligent domesticated animals.
“In some cases you should and could eat it into eradication,” Kaechele says.
Just as there is no hard evidence that cats are the primary force behind species extinction, there is no data to support the idea that randomly killing and eating cats has any positive impact on species survival.
But eating cats isn’t just about saving the world, Kaechele explains. It’s about aesthetics as well.
“In these feasts,” she says, “every element has to be art.”
By that she means she fashions cutlery, centerpieces and containers from the deceased animals.
Kaechele is no stranger to controversy. As an amateur troll, she’s known for attention-grabbing stunts. She’s faced legal complaints for opening an Australian lounge/art gallery that admitted women only, “so men feel as excluded as possible,” and attended one of her subsequent hearings with 20 female supporters who dressed like her and moved in sync with her.
The appearance was “performance art,” she claimed. The judge disagreed, calling it a disrespectful display. Kaechele was also blamed for gentrifying a New Orleans neighborhood after Hurricane Katrina, snapping up and later allegedly abandoning five properties and allowing them to decay. They were subsequently taken over by squatters while Kaechele was MIA, presumably globetrotting and enlivening people’s drab existences by “transforming them into art.”
“Women are better than men in every respect,” Kaechele says in one video, echoing the provocateur Dick Masterson’s assertion that “men are better than women.”
The difference is that Masterson is a character created by a comedian. Whether individual people find his act amusing or not, Masterson performs for an audience of men and women who are well aware his schtick is tongue in cheek. Kaechele may or may not believe what she’s saying, but one thing she’s not doing is comedy. No one’s laughing.
She’s a deeply unserious person who shouldn’t be anywhere near any conversations about conservation.
As for Trim, he can’t bring himself to admit he’s cooking cats. To him, they’re no different than anything else in his fridge or pantry.
“It’s really exciting to be using a lot of these invasive ingredients that we have,” he said.
It’s one thing to consider the possibility that species like cats are signficant drivers of native species extinction, and another to prove they are measurable contributors compared to the hundreds of ways human behavior impacts animal life.
But you have to be really far up your own ass to keep a straight face while claiming you’re saving the world by eating cats, and even more divorced from reality to characterize it as a form of artistic expression.
Perhaps most concerning, telling people that cats are “yummy” could inspire others to try it for themselves, and turning it into a trend would be an entirely new level of barbarism.
Say what you will about people who participate in China’s infamous Yulin dog meat festival. At least they plainly admit they eat dogs and cats because they like the taste without clinging to any pretense that they’re creating high art or saving the planet.
Maggie Beer was reportedly intrigued by the idea of eating a “pussycat sandwich.”
Meet Maggie Beer, a “culinary icon” from Australia who was convinced to teach cooks at some sort of community kitchen on the promise that another chef would kill a feral cat to make her a “pussycat sandwich.”
Beer was invited to help instruct cooks who volunteer for a program feeding Australian seniors. In return, one of the cooks would show her how to prepare domestic cat meat.
That goes a long way to explaining the state of mind in a country that recently killed millions of cats by poisoning them and has pledged to exterminate all free-roaming cats because self-styled conservationists believe felines — not habitat destruction, mass industrialization, the widespread use of carcinogenic pesticides, windmills, glass buildings and all the other changes wrought by human presence — are the primary drivers of local bird and small mammal extinction.
Beer and Brown, cat eaters.
“We were talking a lot about cooking kangaroo tails and then I also told her about how one of our directors… had recently cooked us a feral cat from Kiwirrkurra,” said Sarah Brown, the CEO of Purple House, which prepares meals for Australian seniors.
“She got very excited about this and I said, ‘Well if you come to Alice Springs and do some cooking classes with us, then Bobby West will teach you how to cook a pussycat and you can have a pussycat sandwich for lunch.'”
Feeding seniors intelligent companion animals is about giving them “joy as well as sustenance,” Brown claims.
Thankfully not everyone in Australia thinks this is amusing, nor do they buy the claims that slaughtering cats will magically solve all the problems facing indigenous wildlife.
Pain In The Bud 