How do so many endangered creatures end up in Japan’s animal cafes?
IN JAPAN, it’s possible to enjoy a coffee while an owl perches on your head, or sit at a bar where penguins stare 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 cafes and bring them home.
But visitors to these venues may not realise that many of these cafes put wildlife conservation, animal welfare, as well as the health of themselves and the public at risk.
In an exhaustive survey of Japan’s animal cafes published 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 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. She conducted the study as a post-doctoral researcher at Kyoto University. Many of the animals were “most likely caught in the wild, and this has implications for their long-term survival”.
The potential for the transmission of disease from animals to humans is also worrying, she said.
Cecile Sarabian, a cognitive ecologist at Nagoya University and co-author of the findings, said that 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. Many of the animals are under stress, and “it’s an excellent interface for the exchange of potential pathogens”, she added.
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Sarabian also said the laws governing animal cafes are “quite weak”. The researchers are calling on Japan’s government to strengthen them.
Officials at the Ministry of the Environment did not respond to requests for comment.
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”, Sigaud said.
The researchers visited some cafes in Japan in person. They 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.
Sigaud said the number and diversity of animals came as a surprise. Birds accounted for 62 per cent of species, with 40 per cent of them being owls. But the researchers also recorded dozens of reptiles and mammals.
Thirty-eight of the cafes also offered options for buying the animals they displayed – owls, primarily, but also species as diverse as sugar gliders for US$150 to US$300; ball pythons for US$455 to US$1,290; secretary birds for US$20,500; and red-tailed black cockatoos for US$23,250.
Some of the species were of particular concern, including critically endangered ones, such as the pancake tortoise and the Central American river turtle.
Others were of questionable origin. Bengal slow lorises and Sunda slow lorises, for example, are endangered species from South and South-east Asia that are frequently the victims of poaching; both are strictly banned from international trade. Sigaud said the lorises are difficult to breed in captivity, and no professional facilities for these species exist in Japan.
“So where are they coming from?” Sigaud asked. “It’s hard to believe they’re legal.”
Most of the animals the researchers identified were registered as coming from captive breeding facilities when they were imported into Japan. The international trade of 60 per cent of those species is regulated by the Convention on the International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES).
Only 14 per cent of the animals were marked as coming from the wild, though the researchers said this is likely an underestimate, because there were no records for the 40 per cent of species not regulated by CITES. Wild animals, such as otters, are also known to be laundered as captive-bred to make their trade legal, they pointed out.
In a CITES database search spanning 1975 to 2019, the researchers found no records of any imports into Japan for seven trade-restricted species that were found at animal cafes. These included the Bengal slow loris, spotted pond turtle and barred eagle-owl.
“These gaps trigger more questions than answers,” Sarabian said.
The researchers also flagged welfare concerns at cafes. Sarabian said that birds of prey were chained to perches, and nocturnal species were made to interact with visitors throughout the day. Nearly all species were kept in small cages and artificial environments, and were looked after by people with no specific training or qualifications to work with wildlife.
Animals can become stressed through constant handling.
Kohei Kimura is the owner of Funny Creatures Forest, an animal cafe in Kyoto that specialises in reptiles. He said he often heard criticisms like the ones raised by the new study, including that cafes keep protected species and that the animals there are mistreated.
Funny Creatures Forest exhibits around 40 types of reptiles, plus three owls and some tropical fish. Kimura said he took extra care to ensure he was not contributing to these problems. He sources his animals from wholesalers in Japan, or breeds them himself.
He added that he forbids customers from touching the owls while they are sleeping, and has built his own specialised cages for reptiles because “the commercially available cages are too small”.
Kimura, who has loved cold-blooded creatures since he was a child, said he opened the cafe to share “the charm of reptiles” with others. “A big lizard can make you feel like you’re raising a dinosaur.”
“In Japan, reptiles are often disliked and thought to be scary, but in reality, many of them are gentle,” he added.
Timothy Bonebrake, a conservation biologist at the University of Hong Kong who was not involved in the research, said the study demonstrated the need for stronger regulations and oversight for Japan’s exotic animal cafes. “Overall, I think the analysis makes clear that there is an alarming number of threatened species in these cafes with questionable origin,” he added.
But he noted that with proper regulation, it may be possible for animal cafes to play an active role in conservation, much as many zoos do: by raising public awareness and fondness for wildlife.
“I do wonder often about the possible benefits,” he said. NYTIMES
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