TOKYO — We smelled them before we saw them. Amid an overwhelming reek of urine and scat, we descended a tight staircase into a cramped basement, where tattered ottomans faced a small wire cage.
Within the cage stood the star attractions and source of the odor: four Asian small-clawed otters. Spotting us, the animals burst into chirps, whimpers, shrieks and screams.
After passing around a laminated sheet with warnings printed in Japanese, Mandarin and English (“Otters sometimes become violent”), a handler opened the cage. The animals bolted out and flew about the room, racing over laps and gobbling down kibbles.
Their tubular brown bodies felt like slick, furry throw pillows, and their animated, whisker-framed faces were like those of puppies. Selfies proved difficult: Throughout our 30-minute session, the otters never stopped moving.
Otters are smelly, loud and extremely active; they have sharp teeth and jaws strong enough to crack open shellfish. But in Japan, where more than a dozen animal cafes now feature otters, they have become sought-after exotic pets, displacing owls, slow lorises, sugar gliders and star tortoises.
Many cafes and pet shops sell otters to anyone interested in taking one home. “We’re seeing a rapid increase in demand as the popularity of keeping otters as pets keeps growing,” a cafe attendant told our group. “But the supply isn’t catching up.”A customer at an otter cafe in Tokyo. Many cafes and pet shops also sell otters to anyone interested in taking one home.
Pet otters aren’t just big in Japan. They also are increasingly common in Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam and Malaysia. The internet has largely driven the exponential increase in their popularity and trade as pets, said Nicole Duplaix, a conservation biologist at Oregon State University and co-chairwoman of the otter committee of the International Union for Conservation of Nature.
“Sellers advertise online, and pet owners post endless cute pictures of their little otter, which spreads the news that otters make wonderful pets, which they don’t,” Dr. Duplaix said.
Where are all of these pets coming from? Otters are difficult to breed in captivity without proper techniques. Many conservationists believe that the majority of animals sold as pets are captured in the wild.[
In Thailand, a number of Japanese citizens have been arrested after they were caught trying to smuggle otters through airport security. In Vietnam, Save Vietnam’s Wildlife, a nonprofit organization that rehabilitates animals confiscated from traffickers, has begun receiving otters for the first time in the group’s 14-year history. The police delivered 10 otters to the group in November alone.
Threatened smooth-coated otters and endangered hairy-nosed otters, both found in Southeast Asia, are sometimes caught up in the pet trade. But Asian small-clawed otters, a “terminally cute” threatened species, tend to be the primary targets for poachers, Dr. Duplaix said.
“Young otters are often taken from the wild while their mother is killed trying to defend her litter,” said one expert.CreditNoriko Hayashi for The New York Times
All three species were in trouble long before the pet trade began. Pollution and development have destroyed their habitats, and fishermen and aquaculture farmers kill the animals to remove competition. Poachers also target otters for their skins, which are usually sent to China.
No one knows exactly where or when the otter pet craze began, but a number of experts believe it originated in Indonesia about five years ago, according to Vincent Nijman, an anthropologist at Oxford Brookes University in Britain.
Asian small-clawed otters are not domestically protected in Indonesia, but all trade in unprotected wildlife is subject to a harvest quota, and there is no quota for otters. This makes their commercial trade illegal without a special permit, Dr. Nijman said.
“We now see hundreds on offer on Facebook and Instagram, and none have permits,” he added.
Otter owners in Indonesia often join “civet lover” groups, online communities for fans of small carnivores. Members get together to show off their animals, Dr. Nijman said, parading them down the street on leashes on Sundays in Jakarta, for example.
“On national news and online in Indonesia, this has been presented as something acceptable, fun, novel and exciting,” Dr. Nijman said. “It’s for people who want something different than your normal cat or dog.”
In Thailand, trapping, selling or exporting otters is illegal, but the animals are freely traded online there, too. Penthai Siriwat, a doctoral candidate at Oxford Brookes University, monitored seven Thai-language Facebook pages from 2017 to early 2019, and found 572 individual animals for sale.
“It’s just been increasing,” she said. Over half the otters for sale in Thailand are litters of newborns that have not yet opened their eyes, Ms. Siriwat reported in the Journal of Asia-Pacific Biodiversity.
The rest are mostly juveniles weaned on cat food, which sellers claim are guaranteed to live and thus are more expensive.