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Visitors enjoy experience; critics fear trend will feed illegal wildlife trade
It
is a Sunday afternoon and a sunlit cafe on Bangkok's outskirts is
buzzing with patrons. The air smells of french fries and disinfectant.
Kittens and corgis are darting around between the legs of customers, who
are trying to poke at two parakeets shuffling warily along the edge of a
wooden shelf.
Excited murmurs ripple through the crowd as a
waitress announces that the playpen is ready for the next round of
customers. One by one, the patrons squirt disinfectant on their palms
and enter a glass-walled room to cuddle a squad of meerkats.
Asia
may have seen its share of pet cafes, but none quite with the menagerie
offered in Thailand. Aided by relaxed laws and a thriving wildlife
market, at least four exotic pet cafes have sprung up recently around
the capital.
Animal
activists, however, fear this trend will feed demand for smuggling and
breeding of exotic wildlife purely for entertainment.
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Little
Zoo Cafe, with one branch in Bangkok and another on its outskirts,
touts raccoons, fennec foxes and silver foxes. The Animal Cafe, tucked
in a quiet neighbourhood in Yannawa district, boasts a white-faced owl
as well as caracals and a serval - both African wildcats. Zoota Bistro,
housed in a shopping mall in northern Bangkok, advertises close
encounters with a South American squirrel monkey, wallaby and furless
sphynx cat.
Together with the existing mix of cafes nationwide
featuring cats, dogs, bunnies, Siberian huskies, parrots and sheep, they
are drawing steady interest from both Thais and tourists looking to
touch creatures they can usually see only from afar.
"Kawaii
(cute)! Kawaii!" Ms Kiyoko Nagashima, a 44-year-old sales executive from
Japan, squealed upon entering the Animal Cafe last week, as she spied
the exotic cats prancing around two soft-lit glass enclosures.
"I
came here because I saw on Facebook that you could hug a raccoon," she
told The Sunday Times. "In Japan, you can see them only in the zoo. You
can't hug them."
Typically, customers must buy at least one food
item and drink before they can interact with the animals. The prices are
marked up - one meatball pasta dish at the Animal Cafe, for example,
costs 320 baht (S$13).
Customers are made to clean their hands
and take off footwear before entering the playpens. "Play" is supervised
by staff, who sometimes scoop up the critters and place them on
customers' laps.
Some of the more knowledgeable employees explain
the animals' behaviour. At the Little Zoo cafe, for example, as
meerkats clambered onto their human visitors and tried to search the
contents of their pockets, one employee explained that this is how the
creatures forage for food in the desert sand.
A Wildlife activist
and founder of Wildlife Friends Foundation, is critical of the
trend, saying the artificial environments of these mini petting zoos
could stress the animals. Owls, for example, are nocturnal by nature,
but "if you keep them awake the whole day, they will be so tired they
will sleep at night".
According to a 2013 report on the illegal
wildlife trade by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, Thailand
is "mainly a consumer and trans-shipper of pets and high- value luxury
items", with the rising sales of illegal wildlife on the Internet posing
a challenge to law enforcement. Raids and Customs seizures in the past
have turned up everything from pangolins to otters.
While the pet
cafes typically do not use endangered animals, activists warn that Thai
law provides little protection for non-native species. Also, some
wild-caught animals have been known to be passed off as captive-bred.
"It
is a bit difficult to differentiate between which is traded legally and
illegally," says Ms Nancy Gibson, founder of Thailand-based Love
Wildlife Foundation.
Animal Cafe co-owner Athit Samatiyadekul,
36, says his operations are all above board, and he has the paperwork to
prove it. One raccoon, he said, was bought from a fur factory in Europe
for 35,000 baht.
"We give them food. We give them a job. And we
give them love," he told The Sunday Times. He started his cafe last year
to showcase some of his personal collection of wildlife, which includes
about 300 iguanas, some 80 giant tortoises, arowanas and Alaskan
malamutes. He breeds caracals and servals, which he sells for 250,000
baht each.
He said the cafe is not profitable but he keeps it
afloat by infusing money that he earns from his job as the marketing
director of Sirivatana Interprint, one of the region's largest printing
companies. The same applies to his partner, a friend who runs a Thai
boxing gym, apparel store and restaurant.
"In other restaurants,
people will eat many things," he said. "Here, they come to play with the
animals and to take selfies, so they buy the cheapest food."
Yet
they keep it running because "we like people to come here to be happy".
Unconvinced members of the public have complained about the cafe to the
wildlife authorities, he reveals.
On the day he was interviewed by The Sunday Times, officials turned up to check his paperwork - the second time in a year.
UP CLOSE AND PERSONAL
Kawaii
(cute)! Kawaii! I came here because I saw on Facebook that you could
hug a raccoon. In Japan, you can see them only in the zoo. You can't hug
them. - MS KIYOKO NAGASHIMA, a 44-year-old sales executive from Japan,
on the exotic cats at Animal Cafe.
CAN'T TELL THEM APART
It
is a bit difficult to differentiate between which is traded legally and
illegally. - MS NANCY GIBSON, founder of Thailand-based Love Wildlife
Foundation, on wild-caught animals being passed off as captive-bred.
BENEFITS FOR ANIMALS
We
give them food. We give them a job. And we give them love. - MR ATHIT
SAMATIYADEKUL, Animal Cafe's co-owner, on the animals at his eatery.
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Source - TheNation
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