Facing extinction, but available for selfies in animal cafes

NEW YORK: In Japan, it’s possible to enjoy a coffee while an owl perches on your head, or to sit at a bar where live penguins stare out at you from behind a plexiglass wall.

The country’s exotic animal cafes are popular with locals as well as visitors seeking novelty, cuteness and selfies. Customers can even buy animals at some of the cafes and bring them home.

But visitors of these venues may not realize that many of these cafes put wildlife conservation, their own and public health, and animal welfare at risk.

In an exhaustive survey of Japan’s animal cafes published earlier this year in the journal Conservation Science and Practice, researchers found 3,793 individual animals belonging to 419 different species, 52 of which are threatened with extinction.

Nine of the exotic species they found, including endangered slow lorises and critically endangered radiated tortoises, are strictly banned from international trade.

“Some species we saw are of very questionable origins,” said Marie Sigaud, now a veterinarian and wildlife biologist at the National Museum of Natural History in Paris, who conducted the study as a postdoctoral researcher at Kyoto University.

Many of the animals are “most likely caught in the wild, and this has implications for their long-term survival.”

The potential for transmission of disease from animals to humans is also worrying, Dr. Sigaud said.

At a typical cafe, individual animals of different species are crammed together in a small room where people are allowed to touch them while having a drink, said Cécile Sarabian, a cognitive ecologist at Nagoya University and co-author of the findings. Many of the animals are under stress and “it’s an excellent interface for the exchange of potential pathogens,” she said.

The laws governing animal cafes are “quite weak,” Dr. Sarabian added — and the researchers are calling on Japan’s government to strengthen them. Exotic animal cafes are not uniquely Japanese. Since the first known animal cafe opened in Taiwan in 1998, featuring cats and dogs, the concept has rapidly spread across the region.

A 2020 study identified 111 such businesses in Asia, primarily in Japan but also in China, Thailand, Taiwan, Indonesia, South Korea, Vietnam, the Philippines and Cambodia. Japan, however, seems to have become “the epicentre of the phenomenon,” Dr. Sigaud said.

The researchers visited some cafes in Japan in person and also searched online and across social media in both English and Japanese for keywords such as “pet cafe,” “otter cafe” and “petting zoo.” They found 142 exotic animal cafes across the Japanese archipelago and made a list of all the species they observed in photos posted on the cafes’ websites and social media accounts, excluding insects.

The number and diversity of animals came as a surprise, Dr. Sigaud said.Birds accounted for 62 percent of species, and 40 percent of them were owls. But the researchers also recorded dozens of reptiles and mammals.

“So where are they coming from?” Dr. Sigaud said.

“It’s hard to believe they’re legal.” The international trade of 60 percent of the species the researchers identified in cafes is regulated by the Convention on the International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, or CITES, and most of these animals were registered as coming from captive breeding facilities when they were imported into Japan.

Only 14 percent were marked as coming from the wild, though the researchers say this is likely an underestimate, as no records exist for the 40 percent of species not regulated by CITES.