Wednesday 16 December 2020

Civet Coffee: Is it a good thing or a bad thing?

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Thinking about artificial and natural selection (those who are familiar with my research will know I have written much on that subject regarding who originated the theory of macroevolution by natural selection and who plagiarised it, If not, see my website PatrickMatthew.com for the shocking independently verifiable truth on that topic).

Relatedly (well, sort of), today I purchased some civet coffee for part of my son's Xmas present.

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 I bought it from Amazon and then researched the issue and found I needed to ask some questions of the supplier, having just realised I might have been facilitating a demand for animal cruelty. Check out this article from National Geographic on that https://archive.is/nrG8L See quote form that article imaged below.


The supplier of the coffee I bought is Monkey Business Coffee.  I contacted Monkey Business Coffee and the images below show our conversation. What they told me in December 2020 reflects what they said elsewhere: 

"We import our coffee from wild, ethically-produced Kopi Luwak plantations in Indonesia to our business premises in Bristol. ‘Ethically-produced’ means that we have a strict and independently verified commitment from the plantations that all Kopi Luwak coffee is foraged from the natural environment of the Asian Palm Civets, who do the picking and eating of our Kopi Luwak coffee beans. 

This commitment results in the protection of this beautiful species, supporting local jobs in Indonesia and ensures our Kopi Luwak coffee is the most delicious available.

(Q) How did you go about selecting your suppliers to make sure they followed ethical practices?

"We actually travelled to Indonesia originally to meet with wild sourced Kopi Luwak plantations, ensuring they followed the agreed ethical standards and that all our received Kopi Luwak is sourced only from wild Asian Palm Civets. We also work with local agents and contacts within the Indonesian coffee industry to ensure these commitments are continually abided by." (archived source)

What worries me is that despite what the supplier says the coffee I bought does not publish the "wild and totally unfarmed/uncaged" claim on its website. Why not? Maybe ask National Geographic.

So if what they tell me and others is veracious, and I have no solid reason to suspect it is not in their specific case, you can buy civet coffee and drink it in their supplied to me "knowledge" that it is more likely than not something that really has been "naturally selected" by civets in the wild. I do hope so. But how can I be sure? They don't say it's form wild civets on the their website or where they are selling it on Amazon. They simply say it is ethically sourced. But that label normally means ethical to farmers. Worrying articles (archived) on the issue of cruelty and this coffee when the coffee is being "artificially selected" via  civet captivity below:


1. The Guardian https://archive.is/Y7dOC



. Also, even if humans are gathering wild civet poop from the wild for our coffee wouldn't that interfere with the natural selection process regarding what coffee plants grow where with the benefit of civet fertilizer, and would it it not then follow that such human gathering would interfere down the line - by a kind of artificial selection in the wild - with the civet's selection of coffee growing in the wild? Maybe not, seeing as the coffee they eat, apparently, comes from the coffee plantations they raid.
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