43August 5, 2019An illicit global trade is
endangering a rare mammal
whose defensive maneuver
makes it especially vulnerable to
poaching. By Matthew Campbell
Photograph by Olivier Laude
OF
INJUSTICE
In November, customs agents at Hong Kong International
Airport spotted something unusual as they X-rayed the bag-
gage of a Chinese man who’d just arrived from Ethiopia. They
told the passenger, 44-year-old Lin Jin-Bao, he’d have to open
his suitcases before being allowed to board a ferry to his next
destination, Macau. Inside, the agents found 24 tightly packed
aluminum foil pouches. Each was filled with hundreds of mot-
tled, brownish-red flakes—some shaped like jagged circles, oth-
ers resembling tiny spades.
Lin was swiftly arrested. The suitcases contained 48 kilo-
grams (106 pounds) of pangolin scales, a once-obscure com-
modity that’s become wearily familiar to law enforcement
agencies in Asian hubs. The pangolin, one of the only scaly
mammals known to science, looks a little like a large gecko
crossed with an artichoke. It’s now believed to be among the
world’s most trafficked animals, the victim of aggressive poach-
ing operations set up to serve demand for its scales, which are
considered by some practitioners of Chinese and Vietnamese
traditional medicine to have healing properties, and its meat—a
status symbol in Vietnam.
Lin, whose cargo had an estimated street value of
HK$189,000 ($24,100), pleaded guilty to importing a protected
wildlife product without a license and received a 20-month jail
sentence. He was small fry in an illicit industry that might be
worth billions of dollars, but rare for being convicted. In April
customs officers at a Singapore port terminal inspected a ship-
ping container purportedly full of frozen beef from Nigeria and
found just under 13 tons of scales, with a value they estimated
at about $39 million. Less than a week later they pulled a sim-
ilarly sized haul from a container that was supposed to con-
tain seeds from the cassia plant. That many scales would have
likely required the deaths of some 21,000 pangolins.
Trafficking experts point out with alarm that these seizures
are indicative of an enormous global trade along a sophisti-
cated network, reaching from poachers in Central Africa to
smugglers in Nigeria to middlemen across Asia to consum-
ers in China and Vietnam. Even optimistic wildlife activists
concede that they’re late to the problem. Until recently, they
tended to focus on contraband from what are known in con-
servation circles as charismatic megafauna: species, such as
elephants and rhinos, whose photogenic quality and sym-
bolic import make drumming up public support and donor
dollars comparatively easy. Only in the past decade did the
rise in pangolin trafficking become apparent—a consequence
of rising prosperity in consuming countries and, perhaps,A rescued
pangolin at
Save Vietnam’s
Wildlife in
Cuc Phuong
National Park