U.S. consumer demand helps push pangolins toward extinction

Microsoft founder Paul Allen pushed a Washington state ballot initiative to criminalize trafficking

WASHINGTON D.C.––The Humane Society of the United States, Humane Society International, International Fund for Animal Welfare,  Born Free USA, and the Center for Biological Diversity on July 15, 2015 petitioned the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service to list pangolins as endangered under the Endangered Species Act.

The action came three months after Microsoft founder Paul Allen threw his political weight and fortune behind passing a Washington state ballot initiative that would criminalize trafficking in the body parts of pangolins, elephants, rhinos, sharks, and six other vanishing species, of which pangolins have the least present legal protection.

“If granted,” explained HSUS president Wayne Pacelle, “the Endangered Species Act listing would secure pangolins protection from being trafficked across U.S. borders. According to research conducted by Humane Society International,” Pacelle said, “there is significant demand for pangolin products in the U.S.

“U.S. authorities seized at least 26,000 pangolin products over the past decade,” Pacelle continued, almost all of them imported for alleged medicinal use.

Seized shipments are 10% of volume

“An INTERPOL rule of thumb,” Pacelle said, “is that seized shipments only represent approximately 10% of the total volume traded on the black market, which means that as many as 250,000 illegal products may have made it past authorities and entered the U.S.

“Further research by Humane Society International,” Pacelle added, has confirmed that “many traditional medicine products that contain pangolin scale powder are available for purchase here in the U.S.,” both through “online marketplaces and in brick-and-mortar shops. Many of these products were manufactured in China,” Pacelle alleged, “and are illegal for export under domestic Chinese law. Yet they keep appearing on store shelves here in the U.S.

“Altogether, Pacelle said, “It is estimated that more than 960,000 pangolins were taken from the wild and traded illegally over the past decade, making them the most trafficked mammal in the world.

Preliminary to filing the application to protect pangolins under the Endangered Species Act, Pacelle recounted, “Humane Society International organized the first-ever Pangolin Range States Meeting, co-hosted by the governments of Vietnam and the United States, and attended by 29 pangolin range states.”

IUCN listed pangolins in 2014

The International Union for the Conservation of Nature in July 2014 elevated all four Asian pangolin species to “endangered” status and all four African pangolin species to “vulnerable” status.

“All eight pangolin species are now listed as threatened with extinction,” Zoological Society of London conservation programs director Jonathan Baillie told Adam Vaughan of The Guardian on July 28,  2014,   “largely because they are being illegally traded to China and Vietnam. In the 21st century we really should not be eating species to extinction––there is simply no excuse for allowing this illegal trade to continue.”

Wrote Vaughan, “The Chinese pangolin (Manis pentadactyla) and Sunda pangolin (Manis javanica) are now listed as critically endangered, the worst listing on the Red List before a species is declared extinct, with the Indian pangolin (Manis crassicaudata) and Philippine pangolin (Manis culionensis) upgraded to endangered.”

The IUCN Pangolin Specialist Group took no official notice of the alleged re-export of pangolin products from China and Vietnam to the U.S.

Major seizures

The IUCN escalated attention to pangolins about two months after random inspections at the Kwai Chung cargo port in Hong Kong led to the May 28, 2014 seizure of scales from as many as 8,000 pangolins. The shipment had been labeled plastic scrap from Kenya, but actually originated from South Africa.

Hong Kong inspectors two weeks later intercepted a second clandestine shipment of pangolin scales, identified as “Zingana Sawn Timber,” from Cameroon. The second shipment included the scales from more than 5,000 pangolins.

On June 17, 2014 the Hong Kong Customs & Excise Department announced the arrest of a 46-year-old Malaysian man believed to have been involved in both shipments.

Traffic bigger than was believed

The estimates of the numbers of pangolins killed for their scales in connection with the Hong Kong seizures indicated that the pangolin traffic is markedly larger than had been believed.

         The journal Frontiers in Ecology & the Environment in February 2014 published a projection by Zhao-Min Zhou, of the Public Security Bureau for Forests in Yunnan province, China, and David Macdonald of Oxford University,  editor of The Encyclopedia of Mammals,  that the remains of about 10,000 pangolins per year are intercepted from traffickers.

Zhao-Min Zhou and Macdonald derived their estimate from records of the seizures of 220 living pangolins and the remains of 4,909 pangolins in 43 law enforcement actions since 2010.

“The numbers of pangolins traded are shocking, and all the more so considering the pharmaceutical pointlessness of the trade. This trade is intolerably wasteful,” Macdonald told media.

A plea bargain in Malaysia in January 2012 sent Philippine pangolin trafficker Aivon Vencer,  20,  to jail for three years,  a month after Vencer was caught in the act of trying to smuggle 1,068 frozen pangolin carcasses out of the country by boat.

That was reportedly the biggest seizure of pangolin remains before the Hong Kong seizures in 2014, but it was scarcely an isolated case.  Indonesian Forestry Ministry director of investigations and forest observation Raffles Panjaitan in October 2011 told the Jakarta Post that his agency had recorded 587 cases of pangolin trafficking since 2006,  involving an estimated $4.3 million USD worth of pangolins on the illegal market.

Major pangolin trafficking arrests have also come recently in far eastern India,  Thailand,  and Tibet,  where People’s Daily Online has reported frequent seizures of pangolins and illegal drugs by the Lhasa Customs Office at Zhangmu,  on the China/Nepal border in the Tibet Autonomous Region.

Pangolin farming?

There have been many previous warnings about the international decline of pangolins due to poaching and trafficking to serve the Chinese and Vietnamese markets.  The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species in 2002 prohibited selling pangolins across national borders.

“We have uncovered disturbing information which strongly suggests that ‘medicinal use’ pangolin farms are already operating in China,” said Project Pangolin founders Rhishja Cota-Larson and Sarah Pappin in January 2012.

“The emergence of pangolin farming,”  Cota-Larson and Pappin suggested,  “may help provide insight into why the world is losing pangolins at such an alarming rate––an estimated 40,000 killed in 2011––and why China’s appetite for pangolins continues to increase.  We found that pangolin farming is promoted as an investment opportunity due to continued high demand from the traditional Chinese medicine industry.  In an article discussing how the scarcity of endangered species has created a bottleneck for traditional Chinese medicine production,  the China Association of Traditional Chinese Medicine web site notes that progress is being made,   now that bear farming has been industrialized and pangolin breeding has shown signs of a dawn.  On the Chinese financial news website Eastmoney.com,  there is a page discussing the potential for pangolin breeding,  in response to estimated annual demand for 300,000 pangolins per year.”

As with bear bile and tiger farming,  the growth of a captive population enables sellers to encourage customers to buy more pangolin products,  even as the exploited species disappears from the wild.

The conservation aspect of the disappearance of pangolins has drawn the most attention so far,   but the suffering of individual pangolins is considerable.  Most pangolins taken from the wild are transported to markets and sold live,  if the poachers can keep them alive.  This is also believed to be the fate of farmed pangolins.  If pangolins die in transport or markets,  their remains are frozen and sold.

What is a pangolin?

A survey of U.S. zoogoers reputedly once found that most misidentified the word “pangolin” as a musical instrument,  but many imagined that poaching to get an animal part used to make the instrument might be pushing a rare species toward extinction.

Also called scaly anteaters,  pangolins under 20 years ago remained common across much of Asia and Africa.

But the possibly apocryphal pangolin-is-an-instrument story, told to U.S. zoo docent classes to emphasize the need to improve zoological education,  appears to have included two nuggets of truth.

Most Americans and Europeans do not know what a pangolin is, having never seen one.  And pangolins are now seldom seen anywhere except in Chinese live markets.  Only the most furtive,  nocturnal, and highest-climbing pangolins survive in much of their former habitat–if any survive at all.

Resembling a long-tailed armadillo with the semi-arboreal habits of an opossum, pangolins are believed to have emerged in the Paleocene epoch,  circa 60 million years ago.  Evolutionary geneticist Gene McCarthy of Macroevolution.net argues that pangolins and armadillos might even both be descendants of stegosaurs and ankylosaurs,  two dinosaur families whom McCarthy contends were synapsid proto-mammals,  not reptiles.

Toothless & almost defenseless

Pangolins are toothless.  Of peaceable disposition,  except toward the ants and termites who make up most of their diet in the wild,  pangolins’ chief defense against predation is to roll into a tightly armored ball.  This was more effective against saber-toothed cats and cave bears than against human collectors.

Pangolins have long been hunted for meat and for the purported medicinal qualities of their scales.  Formed of keratin, the same material as fingernails,  pangolin scales were sometimes used to make armor in medieval China.  But until increasing affluence in southern China drove market demand for pangolins up in recent decades,  pangolins remained relatively abundant.

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