Facing Extinction, but Available for Selfies

Animal cafes put wildlife and public health at risk in Japan.

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 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, 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,” Sarabian added — and the researchers are calling on Japan’s government to strengthen them.

Officials at Japan’s 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 epicenter of the phenomenon,” Sigaud said.

Dozens of the world’s largest natural history museums last week revealed a survey of everything in their collections. The global inventory is made up of 1.1 billion objects that range from dinosaur skulls to pollen grains to pinned butterflies. The organizers, who described the effort in the journal Science, said they hoped the survey would help museums join forces to answer pressing questions, such as how quickly species are becoming extinct and how climate change is altering the natural world. The survey included 73 museums in 28 countries.