Coffee, perfume and pandemics - part 1

     Inside an apartment of a wealthy mid-levels neighbourhood, the elderly historian interrupted an interview about bamboo scaffolding to show me a picture of a stripy-headed grey mammal. It was balanced, mid-step, on fencing made of green steel tubes, just outside his flat. It was a civet cat, an animal blamed for giving humans the SARS virus in 2003, which killed about 800 people around the world in a matter of months. It was larger than a cat, more like a small, short-legged dog.

    

Indian small civet caught in AFCD camera trap survey 2002 - 2006

     A regular visitor at night, the historian told me, descending the hillsides of Victoria peak after dark. He was full of wonder, quite proud of his tatty printout. 

     A civet cat in mid-levels? It totally caught me by surprise.

     I suppose that surprise came from the view I had of Hong Kong island as a predominantly urban metropolis. As the first part of the colony captured and tamed by the British in the 19th century, Central district and its surroundings, including the mid-levels, have the longest history of urbanisation in the territory. The headquarters of the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank, global trading giants like Jardines, up-market boutiques in glitzy malls, the exclusive clubs, the most expensive residences in the world, these are the things you expect on Hong Kong island. Not civet cats, all furtive and feral, and trailing a musty stink from their backsides.

    But this pervasive view of Hong Kong is hugely skewed, as you would see on a balloon ride over the island. Starting from the ferry piers you would soon be wafting over the global headquarters of the HSBC. You’ll find it sitting in a jumble of mirrored geometric towers that make up Central district. Blast your furnace for a slow rise, and you’ll see greenery almost immediately at the botanical gardens and its adjacent park. The leafy grounds are hemmed in by concrete and steel for sure, but the scene is a slice of things to come as you rise higher and see beyond the towering apartment blocks of the mid-levels and their feeder roads, and drift over the lush forestry of the Peak and the country parks beyond. Keep gaining altitude and take in the whole of Hong Kong Island. You will finally see the truth, just above the flight path of jets ascending from Chep Lap Kok International airport. This place is a rugged, forest-covered parkland, invaded on its shores and along outer valleys by densely packed but strictly contained human constructs.

         Civets roam these forests mostly unseen by humans. We don’t know the numbers, but we think they’re not doing too badly. Two species were found here when the Agricultural and Fisheries department (AFCD) recently ran a 4-year camera-trap project on mammals. The ground dwelling small Indian civet was the third most photographed animal with more than 1,300 hits in 190 locations, earning it the status of "very common." It followed the East Asian porcupine and the red muntjac, a kind of dwarf deer that looks as if it might have been bred for a Christmas show for children. The other civet species was the masked palm civet, a tree dweller seen in 114 locations and labeled as common. 

     Despite its English name it’s not actually a cat, it’s closer to a mongoose. The Vietnamese class the species as a kind of fox, some members of the family look like badgers or raccoons.  The name in fact applies to several different species of small grayish-black nocturnal mammals that range from Africa across South East Asia. 

     They play a useful roll in regenerating forests, by eating fruit and distributing seeds. They also eat small animals, including snakes, like mongoose do. Some of them upset human design sensibilities by mixing spots with stripes. It’s a clash, and bizarrely wrong, but the camourflage must work in certain types of forest.

    The two varieties found here thrive best on Hong Kong Island, rather than the wider expanses of the New Territories. The one I saw in the picture was clearly a masked palm civet, unmistakable with broad black and white bands running down its face, like some cat burglar blacked-up for the night, prowling the posh neighbourhood for loot.

    But the sighting wouldn’t have come as a surprise to zoologists who know their civets. As far back as 1934, biologist G.A.C Herklots informed Hong Kong naturalist magazine that “districts inhabited by civets can always be recognized by the smell and Mount Cameron must form the island’s headquarters for this family.” Back on the hot air balloon and you’ll see Mount Cameron right in the middle of the island, just a few kilometres from, and linked to it by continuous greenery, the mid-levels. 

     There is an even more intimate link between these stinky cousins of mongoose and the boutique stores in downtown Hong Kong, and it’s all in the scent.

    Civet is not a common word but there is a better than average chance that those who know it are connoisseurs of perfume, or they are animal rights activists who have campaigned against perfume makers. To these people civet is the name of a compound that is put into perfumes as a so-called stabiliser. It is the stuff inside fragrances that makes the scent hang around for a long time. It comes from the backsides of civet cats, not quite from the anus, but from perineal glands just below the tail. 

    Animal rights campaigners have highlighted the cruel and painful practice of squeezing and scraping the sweaty oil off the backsides of captive civets. But farmers have retorted that captured animals naturally scrape their glands against wooden poles set up in their spacious cages, and the oil is harvested from here rather than directly from the animal. It seems likely that both methods are used in various parts of the world.

    Channel said it abandoned the use of natural civet in 1998 for its flagship No. 5 scent. But clearly there is still a market for natural civet, as farms in Africa and South East Asia continue to thrive. Other brands named by animal rights groups include Cartier and Lancome.

    The stabilizing compound is desired by perfumeries for the same reason that civets developed it for themselves, to make smells stick around for as long as possible. Civets trail odor along their territory to send messages to their fellow cats, including important communiqués such as their availability for mating. So they have good reason to make sure their musky calling card lasts. 

    But it is not just the sticking power that makes the greasy excretions useful to humans. The distinctive fragrance of the excretions, after it has been refined and distilled to its essence, plays a part in the bouquet of the finished product. And for some it is precisely the animal extract in a finely blended scent that helps humans find mates too. 

    A 1906 book called Studies in the Psychology of Sex: sexual selection in man, has the following insight about the stuff: “Peau d’Espagne may be mentioned as a highly complex and luxurious perfume, often the favourite scent of sensuous persons, which really owes a large part of its potency to the presence of the crude animal sexual odors of musk and civet.”

    It is an amusing thought that stinking like a cat’s backside could improve your chances of having sex. But my suspicion is that in human mating games, it is smelling like someone who can afford civet grease that is the real aphrodisiac. And in Hong Kong that translates to smelling like someone who lives in the Mid-levels.

    As if making expensive perfume from its bottom isn’t enough, civets also make the most expensive coffee on the planet. Also from their multi-talented backsides. Except this time it really comes out of the anus, not just from near it. Best known by its Indonesian name of Kopi Luwak, this brew sells for ridiculous amounts in trendy little coffee shops around the world from Vancouver to Tokyo, Paris and Hong Kong. Follow the money, you’ll find civet poo.

    The best stuff comes from the Asian palm civet, a smaller version of South China’s masked palm civet. The species is common in South East Asia where Dutch and French colonisers in Indonesia and Vietnam established coffee plantations with seeds from North Africa and Yemen. Civets in the area were probably put out by loss of natural habitat when pioneering colonists slashed and burned their forests, and replaced them with a foreign monoculture. But ecosystems have a way of clawing back, and civets discovered coffee cherries as a delicacy.

    It is hard to imagine who would first make coffee from civet crap but there is a neat theory that it all started from the meaness of plantation bosses. Coffee pickers were obviously curious about the strange and expensive black drink wealthy foreigners thirsted for so much. But owners forbade the pilfering of beans by workers, and there’s no doubt that coffee picking civets would have been treated as vermin and hunted down for fur or meat. But someone must have noticed that civet droppings contained whole coffee nuts intact. Civet guts are designed to digest fruit while keeping seeds undamaged, so they can deposit them with fertilizer some distance from the parent tree. That’s what civets do, it’s their job. So plantation workers followed the animals and found their cacka, retrieved the coffee bean, washed it, dried it, roasted it and brewed it.

    The results were good, damned good. 

    Word got out, connoisseurs got a whiff, and pronounced civet coffee, or Kopi Lowak, the best. Its value shot up and stayed high due to its rarity. It became too expensive for the orginal pioneers to carry on drinking it at home.

    I had a cup of the stuff at the fancy Pacific Place shopping centre, a couple of miles east of the Mid-levels. It cost me 205 Hong Kong dollars, (about US$35) definitely the most expensive coffee I’ve ever drunk, and the most expensive I intend to drink. Poonam from Darjeeling served me a rich dark liquid in specially reserved fine China. She told me that if you drink it all day you feel happy.

    It wasn’t bad at all, considering where it came from. It was smooth and musty, as I was primed to expect from chatter in the coffee blogs. I'm not sure if I would be able to tell it apart from any other high-quality coffee. But I have to admit to being surprised as to how much better it was than I had expected.

   I felt rich buying it, though buying it made me a fair bit poorer. I think my prospects of mating had notched up a tiny bit while I was drinking it, and may remain a tiny bit higher in the future if I mention the experience in the right circles.

    There are two theories to explain why Kopi Luwak is considered so fine. The first is that the bean is partially digested by the civet and thereby loses some of its bitter taste. Proteins are broken down, partial fermentation takes place, somehow the civet’s digestive tract massages the bitterness out of the bean, and turns it into a smooth brew. The other theory is that civets are picky eaters, and connoisseurs of the best coffee cherries. They provide a selection and sorting service that picks off the best quality produce and separates it from the mediocre.

    May be both are true, or neither. May be it’s the power of the story behind the drink, and that’s what people are paying for. Whatever it is, the demand is there and therefore so are the suppliers spreading. In Vietnam they call it fox-dung coffee, and there is a growing export from the Philippines, where they call it alamid coffee, mostly to Japanese buyers. Traditionally it seems that most the stuff has come from wild civets, luwaks, or alamids, but there are also reports of farms in Bali and other places, where captive civets are systematically fed coffee cherries. Then there’s always the bootleg kopi luwak, normal coffee beans labelled as cat dung. Honestly, how many people are going to know the difference?