What do you know about anteaters? Maybe you think they’re weird-looking. Maybe you know this bit of trivia: Remember Arthur, from TVOKids? He’s an anteater. But what you may not know is that the anteater has a scaly cousin called the pangolin. Poachers routinely kill and strip the scales of this cousin for use in folk remedies.
A Multi-Million Dollar Business
Nearly 13 tons – 12.7 to be exact – which is just under 28,000 pounds. It’s certainly a lot of weight. But you may be surprised to learn the dollar value of that amount of pangolin scales: it’s $38 million. That’s in US dollars.
On Monday, April 8th, 2020, a 40-foot crate headed from Nigeria to Vietnam was stopped. It claimed to be filled with seeds. Upon closer inspection, however, authorities uncovered 474 bags of pangolin scales. They estimate over 21,000 pangolins would have been killed to produce a haul like this.
An almost equally-sized shipment was discovered less than a week before, Wednesday, April 3rd. These two shipments contain over 58 times the amount of scales discovered in two loads in 2015 and 2016. All eight species of pangolin are protected by law and are classified as “threatened with extinction” on the International Union of Conservation of Nature’s Red List. The Chinese and Sunda pangolins are critically endangered. It is the giant ground pangolin and the white-bellied tree pangolin who were the victims of these Singapore harvests, and, while not critically endangered, are still heavily protected by their status as “vulnerable.” (2, 3)
The Scales of Justice
Although the value of the scales may be hefty, getting caught isn’t cheap. Perpetrators charged with illegal smuggling of pangolin scales face up to two years in prison and $500,000 in fines.
Following the January 2020 interception of pangolin scales in Hong Kong, WildAid campaigner Alex Hofford praised the customs officials who intercepted these shipments. However, he thinks the government could do more. “We want the Hong Kong government to take a step further,” he says. “At the moment, they’re just catching the mules, the people who collect the containers — not the people at the top of the pyramid.” Given that both the shipments this year originated from the same location, it is not unlikely that they are being smuggled by the same people–and if so, catching these pyramid headers may be of the utmost importance to protect the pangolin. (2, 3, 4)
Pangolin Medicine
Pangolin scales are a traditional part of many East Asian medicines and are thought to cure things such as “excessive nervousness and hysterical crying in children, women possessed by devils and ogres, malarial fever and deafness,” according to a Nature article. Dr. Adrian Loo, from the National Parks Board, finds this “heartbreaking from the conservation point of view. Pangolin scales are just made of keratin – the same material as your hair -” he explains, “so scientifically there is no basis for its purported cure for illnesses.” Yet, it seems like the lack of scientific evidence will not stop these poachers–who often hack the pangolins to death with machetes as the animals curl into a defensive ball. Between 2000 and 2016, over a million pangolins have been illegally traded. (1,2,4)
