For Immediate Release:
March 1, 2021
Contact:
Tapi Mbundure 202-483-7382
Lincoln, Neb. – PETA is offering its thanks—and a box of vegan chocolates—to Boiler Brewing Company, a brewery known for its rare and exotic craft beers, after it agreed to stop selling beer made with kopi luwak, a coffee sourced from the excrement of caged-for-life Asian palm civets.
The decision follows a recent PETA Asia video exposé revealing that civet cats are kept in small, waste-filled cages with barely any room to move around and fed a diet high in—or exclusively of—coffee berries for kopi luwak, which is sold to tourists in cafés around the world for up to $80 per cup.
“Most people would have a hard time unwinding with a pint of beer if they knew it involved abused cats—or their waste,” says PETA President Ingrid Newkirk. “Since kopi luwak is cruelty in a cup, PETA encourages everyone to enjoy fabulous vegan beers and coffees instead.”
The kopi luwak industry also presents a pandemic risk: Caging animals amid their own waste subjects them to stress, suppresses their immune system, and 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.
