Binturongs are large, shaggy, bear-like animals from the forests of Southeast Asia that are not bears. Sometimes called bearcats — a name that is equally misleading, since they are neither — the binturong is a viverrid, related to civets and genets, and it smells unmistakably of freshly made buttered popcorn. Not vaguely. Not approximately. Exactly like buttered popcorn, strongly enough that zookeepers and wildlife researchers consistently describe it as one of the more pleasant-smelling large mammals they work with.
The source of the smell is 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline, the same compound responsible for the aroma of popcorn and fresh bread. It is produced in the binturong’s urine and deposited as the animal walks, with the tail and hindquarters dragging through the urine to spread the scent across branches and leaves. The binturong marks its territory by walking through its own urine, which sounds unpleasant but produces an outcome that smells like a cinema lobby.
The tail is prehensile, one of only two carnivores with a fully prehensile tail, the other being the kinkajou of South America. The binturong uses it as a fifth limb in the forest canopy, wrapping it around branches for stability while feeding or moving. The tail is strong enough to support the animal’s full body weight, which can reach 20 kilograms, and it is used constantly during arboreal movement in a way that makes the binturong look more like a primate than a carnivore. Females are typically larger than males, a pattern of reversed sexual dimorphism that is unusual among carnivorans.
The face is distinctive, with long white whiskers, small rounded ears with tufted tips, and an expression that most people describe as grumpy. The eyes are reddish-brown and the overall impression is of an animal that has been assembled from parts of several different species and is mildly annoyed about it.
Why Binturongs Matter to Forests
Binturongs are important seed dispersers for strangler figs, a group of trees that begin life as epiphytes on host trees and eventually envelop and kill them, becoming significant components of Southeast Asian forest structure. The seeds of strangler figs have a tough coating that needs to be abraded before they can germinate, and passage through a binturong’s digestive system provides exactly the right degree of abrasion. Some strangler fig species germinate significantly better after passing through a binturong than through any other frugivore tested. Beyond figs, binturongs are opportunistic omnivores, eating fruit, small vertebrates, invertebrates, eggs, and carrion depending on what the forest offers — a flexible diet that reflects the richness and variability of the habitats they occupy.
The binturong is not the only animal that eats strangler figs, but it is one of the most effective dispersers, and in forests where binturong populations have declined, strangler fig recruitment has been affected. The popcorn-scented carnivore with the prehensile tail is also a forest engineer, shaping the structure of the canopy through its digestion.
Why Binturongs Are Declining
Binturongs are listed as Vulnerable on the IUCN Red List, with populations declining due to hunting for the wildlife trade, where they are kept as pets and used in traditional medicine, and habitat loss across their range. They are slow-reproducing and dependent on intact forest, which makes them sensitive to the fragmentation that has affected much of Southeast Asian forest over the past 50 years. Binturongs are found across a broad range that includes parts of India, Bangladesh, Myanmar, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Philippines, but their numbers are falling across much of this range as forest cover shrinks and hunting pressure continues.
Conservation efforts for the binturong are still limited relative to the scale of the problem. Captive breeding programmes exist in a number of zoos, and some range countries have legal protections in place, but enforcement is inconsistent and the wild trade persists. The animal that smells like popcorn, that marks its territory by walking through its own urine, that disperses the seeds of trees that reshape forests, is disappearing from forests that are themselves disappearing. The smell will go with it. Read more about remarkable wildlife on the Wild Wonders Daily blog.