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