poachers switching opportunistically as other species grew
more difficult to trade.
“The number of animals being stripped from the wild
is completely out of control,” says John Scanlon, a former
secretary-general of Cites, the main international organiza-
tion for regulating trade in endangered species. “I fear they’ll
be wiped out before we’ve adequately responded.”Pangolins are a low-key marvel of the natural world. There
areeight known species, with a geographic range that cov-
ers India,Southeast Asia, southern China, and much of sub-
Saharan Africa. Most are nocturnal; all are toothless, relying
instead on sticky, muscular tongues that can extend as long
as their body. Most of the time, the appendage lies dormant
in an internal sheath. When required, it can shoot deep into
ant and termite nests with lethal speed and force, conjur-
ing scenes of Lovecraftian horror. Pangolins also have claws
that are well-adapted to digging for prey as well as special-
ized muscles that seal their ears and nos-
trils against incursion by insects. They’re
myrmecophagous Terminators, each capa-
ble of killing, by one estimate, as many as
70 million bugs a year.
Shy and typically solitary, pangolins
can be found in a variety of habitats, with
some species preferring to burrow and oth-
ers fond of climbing trees, sometimes using
their muscular tails for balance. Females
typically give birth to a single offspring,
after a gestation of several months or more, and each infant
requires significant maternal investment. Until a juvenile pan-
golin is mature enough to fend for itself, it rides atop its moth-
er’s tail as she forages for food.
Evolution’s other great gift to the pangolin is, tragically, its
main attraction for poachers: its scales, a robust armor of ker-
atin, the same material responsible for human fingernails and
rhino horns. When a pangolin is threatened or startled, its
main defense is to curl into a ball, hiding its soft underbelly
(and, if necessary, an accompanying infant) inside this jagged
thicket. YouTube clips show lions reduced to helpless incom-
prehension when an appealing-looking snack suddenly turns
rock hard, impervious to tooth or claw. Unfortunately for the
pangolin, though, it reacts the same way to humans, who can
simply deposit a frightened victim into a sack like a beach ball.
Pangolins have proved difficult to track and count, making
it hard to gauge how steeply their populations have declined.
Their preference for trees and burrows makes them easily
missed by camera traps, and unlike with other mammals,
their eyes don’t readily shine in the glow of a flashlight. One of
the more comprehensive efforts to quantify pangolin poach-
ing, a 2017 study by researchers from the University of Sussex
and other institutions, produced only a very broad estimate
that 400,000 to 2.7 million of the animals are hunted annu-
ally in Central Africa. Scientists don’t need a precise count,
though, to conclude that the pangolin is in serious trouble.The International Union for Conservation of Nature classifies
the Chinese pangolin and the Sunda pangolin of Southeast
Asia as critically endangered; of the other six species, two
are listed as endangered and the remainder as vulnerable.
Poachers succeed where researchers struggle because they
can sprinkle hundreds or even thousands of snares around a
known habitat. Another reliable tactic is sniffer dogs, which
can be adept at finding pangolins even in their burrows.
Hunters go to these lengths because pangolin farming is uni-
versally regarded as nonviable. The animals reproduce slowly
and unmanageably, and they’re too easily stressed and sus-
ceptible to illness.
The major source countries are thought to include
Cameroon, the Central African Republic, and Congo. As best
as investigators can tell, much of the poaching takes place at
relatively small scale, with loads consolidated into gargan-
tuan cargoes by middlemen en route to port cities such as
Lagos. One indicator of the smugglers’ power: Cites consid-
ers shipments of elephant ivory larger than
500 kilograms to indicate the involvement
of organized crime, a small fraction of the
size of some pangolin-scale seizures. The
best guess, according to Richard Thomas
of Traffic, a U.K.-based organization that
monitors the wildlife trade, is that the cul-
prits are “organized Asian criminal syndi-
cates who must have a pretty extraordinary
sourcing network.”
For the most part, it’s just a guess.
Prosecutions of smugglers are much rarer than seizures of their
wares, and no law enforcement agency has come close to iden-
tifying the Cali cartel of pangolin trafficking. And just as with
drugs, there’s every reason to believe that as long as demand
for scales and meat persists, so too will illicit efforts to meet it.Lan Ong Street, in Hanoi’s Old Quarter, is the traditional-
medicine capital of Vietnam, a stretch of dark, narrow shops
packed into the ground floors of crowded tenements. The
vendors sell a panoply of natural remedies: cordyceps mush-
room for impotence, ginseng for stress, morinda root for
joint pain. Not long ago, they would have displayed pango-
lin scales, which were sold more or less openly for arthri-
tis and asthma and as an aid to lactation. Now the scales are
gone, or at least hidden; on a recent visit, five Lan Ong shop-
keepers said they no longer sold pangolin products for fear of
punishment. Since 2017 Vietnam has imposed stiff penalties
for selling the animal, in keeping with a trade ban accepted
by the 182 nations that are party to Cites.
The moratorium on international trade doesn’t extend to
sales within countries. Scales remain legal in China, though
officially at least they must be drawn from an existing state-
administered stockpile—a sort of Strategic Pangolin Reserve.
Activists have doubts about how thoroughly this requirement
is enforced and worry that smuggled scales are being used to
replenish the stockpile.44
Bloomberg Businessweek August 5, 2019Pangolin scalesATHIT PERAWONGMETHA/REUTERS