National Geographic USA – June 2019

the illegal wildlife trade by Lisa Hywood and

her team recover.

Hywood—a fiery, compact woman prone to

alternating between cooing lullabies to her res-

cues and vociferously condemning the cruelty

of man—has rescued more than 180 pangolins

since 2012. Tikki Hywood is also home to res-

cued sable antelope, cows, a feisty goat, and a

pair of donkeys named Jesus and Mary. (Joseph

is no longer with us.)

Young pangolins like being up high. Until

they’re several months old, their mothers carry

them on their backs so the babies can observe

how to behave. That’s probably where Tamuda

was spending most of his time just before poach-

ers snatched him and his mother from the wild.

When a pangolin mother is afraid, she rolls into

a ball, protecting her soft, peach-fuzz belly and

her baby with the armor of her scales. It’s good

defense against a lion, but it’s about the worst

thing to do when your predator is a human and

can scoop you up with bare hands.

Tamuda and his mother came to the rescue

center in early 2017. A Zimbabwe border patrol

officer caught a man from Mozambique trying

to cross into the country with them in a sack.

According to the wildlife trade monitoring organi-

zation Traffic, an estimated one million pangolins

The nonprofit National Geographic Society helped
fund this story. To read more reporting by Wildlife
Watch, visit natgeo.com/wildlife-watch.

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