Being a solitary animal Civets usually only comes out under the cover of darkness having spent most of their daylight hours resting in the safety of a high tree.
African Civets (Civettictis civetta) are most commonly found in tropical forests and jungles and areas where there is plenty of dense vegetation to provide both cover and animals that the African Civets feeds on. Despite being a carnivorous mammal it has quite a varied diet of both animal and plant matter. Small animals such as rodents, lizards, snakes and frogs make up the majority of its diet along with insects, berries and fruits that it finds on the forest floor.
Despite their cat-like appearance and behaviours, the African Civets are not felines at all but are in fact more closely related to other small carnivores including Weasels and Mongooses. Having very distinctive features they are one of the easiest cats to recognise. The average African Civet has a body length of 70cm and a tail of about the same length. Fur colouring is black and white with black bands around the eyes in a grey face which gives them a look similar to that of a raccoon. The hind legs are quite a bit longer than the front and the paws of the African Civet each have five digits with non-retractable claws to enable the Civet to move about in the trees more easily.
Mating seems to be the only time one sees Civet cats coming together. Gestation lasts for a couple of months with up to four young being born in underground burrows that have been made by other animals. Civet babies are born quite mobile and with fur, the young are completely dependent on mother’s milk for about six weeks. After about 42 days, their mother provides them with solid food and by the second month, they are catching food for themselves. While they can live for up to 15 – 20 years old it is very rare that they do.
While being a rather ferocious predator they are preyed upon by many other predators within their natural environment the most common being lion, leopard along with reptiles such as large snakes and crocodiles.
African Civet populations are also under threat from both habitat loss and deforestation, and have been subject to trophy hunters in the past across the continent and the bush meat trade. One of the biggest threats to the African Civet is the want for their musk.
The glands close to the African Civets reproductive organs secrete musk (civetone) which Man for hundreds of years have collected. In its concentrated form, the smell is said to be quite offensive to people, but much more pleasant once diluted. It was this scent that became one of the ingredients in some of the most expensive perfumes in the world and made the African Civet a well-known African animal.
African civets have been kept in captivity and milked for this secretion which is diluted into perfumes, secreting three to four grams per week and it can be sold for just under five hundred dollars per kilogram. The WSPA says that Chanel, Cartier, and Lancôme have all admitted to using this secretion in their products and that laboratory tests detected the ingredient in Chanel No. 5
Capturing and keeping of African Civets for their musk is said to be an incredibly cruel industry with the Civet very often dying in the first three weeks from stress and being kept in small cages. As far as I understand from what I have read they are not bred in captivity and are replaced from the wild when they die.
I was very pleased to read that today few perfumes still contain actual musk from the glands of African Civet cats as many scents today are easily reproduced artificially. However even though synthetic alternatives have been available for nearly 70 years, civetone remains an important export commodity in several countries!
The ICUN reports that (quote) there are over 200 registered and licensed African Civet farmers who capture African Civets in the wild and keep several thousand individuals in captivity for musk production in Ethiopia. In that country, only 2% of the civet musk produced is used nationally; the rest is exported, essentially to France (85%), for the perfume industry (Girma 1995). Small quantities of civet musk are also exported to Arabian countries for medicinal purposes and to India for use in the tobacco industry.
