numbers crashed and imports brought into the
country before the bans went into place.
Pangolin trade records from CITES showthat China imported a little more than 16 tons
of scales during the 21-year period from 1994 to
2014—not nearly enough to meet the demand
from pharmaceutical companies. Furthermore,
the provincial governments often don’t verify
that businesses are getting scales from stock-
piled, rather than recently—and illegally—
caught pangolins, says Zhou Jinfeng, director
of the China Biodiversity Conservation group in
Beijing that has been investigating the pangolin
trade. He says he’s skeptical that scale stockpiles
in China are big enough to fill companies’ needs
more than two decades after pangolins virtually
disappeared in the country.
“I don’t buy it,” he says. “After so many years,they still have that many in the stockpiles?”
N
O ONE REALLY KNOWS how many tons
of pangolin scales are being smug-
gled each year—that’s the nature of
the black market. But we do know it’s
a lot, and we do know that the big-
gest shipments are going to China.
In 2017, for example, Chinese customs officialsconfiscated more than 13 tons of pangolin scales,
from as many as 30,000 pangolins—one of the
biggest seizures on record. Last year Hong Kong
authorities seized 7.8 tons of scales in a single
shipment on its way to China.
In all, China accounted for almost 30 percentof scale seizures globally from 2010 to 2015,
according to Traffic. Keeping in mind that sei-
zures are believed, conservatively, to represent
about a quarter of actual illegal trade, these
numbers suggest that hundreds of thousands
of pangolins are slaughtered each year. (National
Geographic asked several Chinese government
agencies for comment and received no response.)
Chinese companies are said to be working tobreed pangolins on a large scale so they’ll have
a steady supply. According to the China Bio-
diversity Conservation group, the government
as of 2016 had issued 10 licenses to facilities to
breed pangolins, ranging from rescue centers
to investment companies. Another 20 phar-
maceutical companies—along with businesses
in Uganda, Laos, and Cambodia—launched a
“breeding alliance” in 2014.
The problem is that no one has figured outhow to breed pangolins on a commercial scale.
“There’s just no way—you cannot satiate
demand through breeding,” says Paul Thomson,
a conservation biologist and co-founder of the
nonprofit Save Pangolins. “Pangolins stress so
easily. And they don’t rebound quickly.”
Most pangolins don’t survive more than 200
days in captivity, he says, let alone breed and
give birth.
This hasn’t stopped Chinese business people
from trying. In 2013 a Chinese woman named
Ma Jin Ru started a pangolin-breeding oper-
ation called Olsen East Africa International
Investment Co. Ltd., in Kampala, Uganda, with
a provisional permit from the Uganda Wild-
life Authority and, later, with backing from a
government- affiliated Chinese foundation. Not
long after, a company called Asia-Africa Pango-
lin Breeding Research Centre was also registered
and licensed in Kampala.
Both companies were raided, in 2016 and
2017 respectively, by Ugandan authorities who
had grown suspicious that the facilities were
serving as cover for the trafficking of pango-
lins caught from the wild. The license issued
to Olsen East Africa, for example, permitted
captive breeding, but investigators suspected
the companies were capturing and trading pan-
golins illegally—without a permit.
Another Asia-Africa Pangolin Breeding
Research Centre was established, in Mozam-
bique, in 2016 and later raised suspicions among
Mozambican wildlife authorities for the same
reasons. In China, investigators from Zhou’s
nonprofit tried to visit several of the licensed
facilities, all of which denied them access.
Keeping pangolins alive in captivity is a gar-
gantuan task. In addition to their unique diet,
they require special care because they’re prone to
stomach ulcers and pneumonia, usually brought
on by stress. Six zoos and a nonprofit in the
United States imported 46 pangolins from Togo
in 2016, aiming to study the animals under con-
trolled conditions and establish a self- sustaining
population. As of early March, 16 had died.P
ANGOLINS ARE NOT HARD to find in
Cameroon. They’re for sale at outdoor
bushmeat markets, where they lie
dead next to monkeys and pythons
on folding tables. They’re for sale on
the sides of the roads, where vendors
hold them upside down by the tails for passing
drivers to see. They’re a common enough sightPANGOLINS 91