Four alpacas, one café and a test of animal care near Islamabad

Four alpacas are the reported draw at a new café at a zoo near Islamabad: visitors can have a drink and pet an animal, rather than watch from the other side of an enclosure. It is a small number at the centre of an attraction built around close contact. The important question is not simply how close visitors can get, but whether the animals can get away when they have had enough.⁠¹

DW News reports that the café’s owner, Kasim Khan, wants children to spend less time on screens and learn to care for living animals. He presents the encounter as a way to encourage conservation awareness. That is an appealing ambition. But selling access to an animal and teaching respect for one are different propositions; the second may sometimes require limiting the first.⁠¹

There is not enough documented evidence to call this café either a conservation success or an animal-welfare failure. Its educational impact has not been established, and the available reporting contains no veterinary assessment or behavioural measurements showing how its alpacas are faring. Those gaps matter more than the novelty of combining refreshments with petting.

The four-animal figure comes from DW’s November 6 report and describes the alpacas available for the café encounter. It is not an independently established count of every alpaca at the zoo. DW also describes the attraction as Pakistan’s first alpaca café, a national-first claim that remains independently unverified.⁠¹

Other coverage does not resolve the venue’s identity. Euronews, in an October 30 report, describes a “Coffee with Alpaca” attraction at Multi Zoo on Islamabad’s outskirts and gives a count of ten animals. The Diplomatic Insight also names Multi Zoo. Neither account establishes that this is the same operation described by DW.⁠¹²⁠¹⁷

Those descriptions cannot safely be merged into a single account—or treated as evidence that the number has fallen from ten to four. They may describe different scopes or operations; the available evidence does not settle which. The precise venue name and opening date for the café in DW’s report therefore remain unconfirmed.⁠¹⁠¹²

For families, the appeal is nevertheless straightforward. An encounter offers children an opportunity to practise gentleness around a living animal rather than merely look at one. Khan’s stated intention deserves to be understood on those terms, without turning it into a demonstrated outcome. The reporting provides no measurement of what children learn, whether their behaviour changes afterwards or whether the café supports a specific conservation programme.⁠¹

General camelid-care guidance gives a useful starting point for assessing the experience. Alpacas are social animals with a flight response: they may try to escape when they perceive danger. The guidance recommends calm, quiet handling. An encounter that delights a child can still be intrusive or frightening to the animal; being sociable is not the same as welcoming every approach.⁠³

Care also extends beyond the petting area. SPCA New Zealand advocates access to suitable outdoor surroundings—scrub, woodland or pasture—for browsing for as much of the year as possible, together with shelter, shade and opportunities for species-specific behaviour. These are relevant expectations for alpaca husbandry, not evidence that the Islamabad-area café either meets or breaches them.⁠⁶

DW raises unnatural lighting and constant visitor exposure as potential sources of stress in animal cafés. That warning should not be mistaken for a finding about these four animals. There is no verified account here of the café’s lighting schedule, the amount of contact each alpaca receives or any resulting harm. Nor does the available guidance establish an alpaca-specific numerical lighting limit or a maximum safe duration for visitor contact.⁠¹

Allowing an animal to withdraw would be a sensible precaution, not a guarantee that every other welfare need has been met. Equally, a general warning about animal cafés cannot substitute for observing this one. The fair test is its actual handling, housing, rest and care—not an assumption that petting must be harmless or that commercial contact must be abusive.

The strongest version of Khan’s educational idea would make those limits part of the lesson. Children could learn that caring for an animal includes accepting that it may not want attention. For a business whose attraction is proximity, that is a demanding principle: sometimes the responsible encounter is the one a visitor does not get.