In Japan, you can drink coffee while an owl sits on your head, or sit in a bar where live penguins watch you from behind a plexiglass wall. Exotic animal cafes in the country are popular with both locals and visitors looking for novelty, cuteness and selfies. Customers can even buy animals from some cafes and bring them home.

But visitors to these places may not realize that many of these cafes endanger wildlife conservation, their own and public health, and animal welfare.

In an exhaustive japan animal survey cafe, published earlier this year in the journal Conservation Science and Practice, researchers found 3,793 individual animals belonging to 419 different species, 52 of which are endangered. Nine of the exotic species they have discovered, including the endangered slow lorises and endangered radiation turtles, are strictly prohibited from international trade.

“Some of the species we saw are of very dubious origin,” said Marie Sigot, now a veterinarian and wildlife biologist at the National Museum of Natural History in Paris, who did the research as a postdoctoral fellow at Kyoto University. Many animals are “likely to be caught in the wild and this affects their long-term survival.”

Potential animal-to-human transmission of the disease is also a concern, dr. Sigo said.

In a typical cafe, individual animals of different species crowd together in a small room where people are allowed to touch them while drinking, says Cecile Sarabian, a cognitive ecologist at Nagoya University and co-author of the results. Many animals are under stress and “this is a great interface for exchanging potential pathogens,” she said.

Laws governing pet cafes are “quite lax,” says Dr. Sarabyan added that the researchers are calling on the Japanese government to strengthen them.

Representatives of the Japanese Ministry of the Environment did not respond to requests for comment.

Cafes with exotic animals are not exclusively Japanese. Ever since the first known pet cafe featuring cats and dogs opened in Taiwan in 1998, the concept has quickly spread throughout the region. A 2020 study identified 111 such enterprises in Asia, mainly 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 this phenomenon,” the doctor said. Sigo said.

The researchers personally visited some cafes in Japan and also searched the Internet and social media in English and Japanese for keywords such as “pet cafe”, “otter cafe” and “petting zoo”. They found 142 exotic animal cafes in the Japanese archipelago and compiled a list of all the species they saw in photos posted on cafe websites and social media, excluding insects.

The number and variety of animals came as a surprise to the doctor. Sigo said. Birds made up 62 percent of the species, and 40 percent of those were owls. But the researchers also recorded dozens of reptiles and mammals.

Thirty-eight cafes also offered options to purchase their exhibited animals—primarily owls, but also species as diverse as sugar gliders—for $150–$300; ball pythons $455 to $1290; secretary birds for $20,500; and red-tailed black cockatoos for $23,250.

Some of the species were of particular concern, including endangered species such as the pancake turtle and the Central American river turtle. The rest were of dubious origin. The Bengal slow loris and the Sunda slow loris, for example, are endangered species from South and Southeast Asia that are often poached and are strictly banned from international trade. They are difficult to breed in captivity, dr. Shigo said that there are no professional facilities for these species in Japan.

“So where are they from?” doctor, Seago said. “It’s hard to believe they’re legal.”

International trade in 60 percent of the species found by researchers in cafes is regulated by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, or CITES, and most of these animals were registered as coming from nurseries when they were introduced to Japan. Only 14 percent have been noted as coming from the wild, although the researchers say this is likely an underestimate as no records exist for the 40 percent of non-CITES species. Wild animals such as otters are also known to be laundered as captive-bred to make their trade legal, they note.

Searching the CITES database from 1975 to 2019, the researchers also found no record of imports into Japan of seven highly trade-controlled species found in pet cafes, including the Bengal slow loris, the spotted pond turtle, and the striped eagle. owl

“These gaps raise more questions than they answer,” says Dr. Sarabyan said.

She and her colleagues also reported welfare issues at the café. Animals can be stressed from constant handling, birds of prey are chained to perches, and nocturnal species are forced to interact with visitors during the day. Sarabyan said. Almost all species are kept in small cages and artificial conditions, and are cared for by people who do not have special training or qualifications for working with wildlife.

Kohei Kimura, owner of Funny Creatures Forest, a Kyoto-based animal cafe that specializes in reptiles, said he has often heard criticisms similar to the one that sparked the new study, including that the cafe houses protected species and that animals are mistreated there. Mr Kimura, whose cafe features about 40 species of reptiles, as well as three owls and several tropical fish, said he was taking extra care not to exacerbate these problems. He buys all his animals from wholesalers in Japan or breeds them himself. He says he forbids clients from touching owls while they sleep and has built his own specialized reptile cages because “commercially available cages are too small.”

Mr. Kimura, who has loved cold-blooded creatures since childhood, said he opened his café 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 considered scary, but in fact, many of them are gentle,” he added.

Timothy Bonbrake, a biologist at the University of Hong Kong who was not involved in the study, said the new study showed the need for stricter regulations and oversight of Japanese exotic animal cafes. “Overall, I think the analysis clearly shows that there are an alarming number of endangered species of dubious origin in these cafes,” he said.

But he noted that with proper regulation, animal cafes can play an active role in conservation, as many zoos do: by raising public awareness and love for wildlife. “I often wonder about the possible benefits,” he said.