Gorongosa 2024-FULL-FINAL - Flipbook - Page 33
ZO OLOGY
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GORONGOSA SP ECIAL
Nearly a million pangolins have been trafficked from
African and Asian countries in the past two decades.
Heinrich and others shed light
on the history and dynamics of
the pangolin trade in another
paper published in 2016. For
centuries, various parts of the
pangolin anatomy have featured
prominently in traditional Chinese medicine—particularly the
scales. If those were ground to
powder or burned to ash, the old
texts held, they could ward off
evil spirits and midnight hysterias, provide a salve against ant
bites, hemorrhoids, and malaria,
stimulate lactation in women,
and aid in circulation. Western
science doesn’t support these
claims, but the traditions proved
persistent, with more than 200
Chinese pharmaceutical firms
offering medicines based on pangolin scales. Indeed, it wasn’t
until 2020 that Chinese health insurers stopped covering these remedies.
Pangolins are also a prized delicacy in Vietnam.
Challender describes visiting an upscale Ho Chi Minh
City restaurant in 2012, where he watched a group of
diners pay $700 for a meal consisting of about 4 pounds
of pangolin meat. The animal was brought to their table
alive, its throat slit in front of them, and its blood was
mixed with wine before its flesh was grilled.
But the 2016 study by Heinrich highlighted another
historic pangolin consumer—the United States.
Between 1975 and 2000—when CITES set the export
quota for Asian Pangolins to zero, essentially banning
the international trade—America was a voracious client of the pangolin’s striking diamond-patterned skin,
using it for wallets, handbags, and high-end cowboy
boots. Many of these items can still be found on the
grayish markets of the internet, though for a stiff price.
University of Adelaide professors Joshua Ross and Phill
Cassey, in a 2019 paper co-authored with Heinrich,
described tracking down a pair of pangolin skin boots
for sale on the U.S. eBay site for $13,000. (By May 2023,
they had apparently been sold.)
In the years since the COVID pandemic, China has
established a raft of prohibitions meant to curtail the
illegal pangolins trade. But as those focus mainly on
pangolin meat, they have not so much dampened the
trade as changed its character. Xu Ling, China coordinator for the wildlife trade monitoring group Traffic, told
the Guardian that there has been a drop in the number
of frozen pangolin carcasses arriving in the country for
consumption as meat. Instead, it’s the scales that are
smuggled in, which Ling says are harvested in Africa.
And the quantities are on the uptick, a study published in Nature Conservation shows. Researcher James
Kehinde Omifolaji of Federal University Dutse in Nigeria and his coauthors combed through arrest records,
seizure reports, and other law enforcement data on
China’s illicit imports to reach some startling numbers. According to their research, a total of more than
400,000 pounds of pangolin scales made their way to
27 different Chinese provinces in 2021.
Pangolins are lucrative even at the point of sale—or,
rather, theft. Angela says that poachers in Mozambique
can fetch between $450 to $750 per animal they capture
and sell onto the black market.
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