The Chinese government has removed pangolin scales from its 2020 list of approved ingredients used in traditional Chinese medicine, a move campaigners describe as a 'critical step' towards saving the world's most trafficked mammal.
Pangolins are scale-covered insectivores, about the size of a house cat, that are highly valued in Asia for their meat and scales. Last year alone, authorities seized more than 130 tons of pangolin related products, a figure estimated to represent up to 400,000 animals, according to conservation group WildAid.
"These actions of China will have a real impact, these are steps that were critical, that needed to be taken if real conservation was going to happen for these animals," said David Olson, director of Conservation at WWF Hong Kong. The trade in pangolins has had a devastating impact on local populations in Asia. According to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, pangolin populations in China have dropped by more than 90% since 1960.
"The momentum has been building for years ... when this news was announced yesterday it was trending on social media with more than 150 million views," he said.The latest move to protect pangolins comes in the wake of new research that suggests pangolins kept in wildlife markets across China may have helped incubate the novel coronavirus before it spread to humans.
Following the outbreak, the Chinese government outlawed the consumption of all wild animals countrywide in an effort to avoid further deadly outbreaks.
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