Meet the Luwak

Meet Larry the luwak, he was going to be named Lawrence but the 'L' and 'r' thing caused problems for my Japanese wife; amusing for me, not so much for her. Larry is an Asian Palm Civet aka Paradoxus hermaphroditus aaka "the guy that poops the golden beans*".

Larry is closely related to the mongoose and is slightly larger than your average house cat, unless you're Siegfried & Roy. He has a biggish family of 20 or so close relatives throughout the tropics however Larry himself is only found in south east Asia.

Interestingly, coffee is native to Ethiopia where there are different, African luwaks, but those luwaks don't eat coffee beans.

Larry likes the night, he uses it as cover to sneak through the coffee plantations and scoff coffee cherries wreaking havoc on the crops of the poor coffee farmer. As a result Larry's popularity with said farmers is pretty low, so low in fact that they usually shoot him on sight. But the beans are worth it.

Larry and friends are usually quite tolerant of humans and if allowed to live unmolested can be found everywhere from deep jungles to villages and even cities. In Bali they are often seen (and even more often heard) climbing around in the roof and along walls of houses and hotels in many popular tourist areas.

In nature one of Larry's most treasured past times is hanging out in trees, left to his own devices he'd spend much of the time sniffing around for his favourite foods which includes almost any fruit, eggs and even the odd piece of chicken.

Larry's claws are short and sharp, he's a good climber and a better scratcher.
He also has lots of tiny, sharp teeth, and he's not afraid to use them...

* Larry himself is (was) purely a housepet, he became too spoiled to actually eat coffee beans.