DAVAO CITY—Pity for civets, locally known as musang, turned into a profitable business venture for a farm owner who had seen how neighbors treated civets as pests and killed them.
Philip Dizon, saying he could no longer bear the thought of civets being killed, asked his neighbors to simply capture the animals and turn them over to him instead of killing them.
Dizon recounted to reporters here how civets are being killed by residents, mostly farmers, in Kapatagan.
“Civet cats were the farmers’ biggest enemy and considered as pests in the farm,” he said.
Dizon said farmers would ensnare the animals and then kill them one by one.
“The only way these farmers could get rid of them is by killing these animals. So I thought that there must be something we could do to save the animals and help the farmers at the same time,” he said.
Dizon told his neighbors they can continue ensnaring the animals but deliver them to him alive instead of killing them. The people agreed.
So as the number of the civets caged in his farm grew larger, Dizon thought of feeding them fresh coffee beans.
He knew that civet coffee is prized worldwide and that starting a production would be the wiser thing to do.
“These green beans are excreted by the weasel-like animal because they can only digest the pulp,” he said.
Dizon collected the excreted coffee beans, washed and dried them before packing them.
Just weeks after he started collecting the civet excrement, Dizon’s Mt. Apo Civet and Altura coffee beans showed up in select shops in the city.
Today, he produces 60 to 90 parchment bags of civet coffee every week, which are also being sold to regular buyers from Manila and other countries.
Dizon’s civet coffee is being sold for about P1,000 per 100-gram bag.