Meet the bold Nigerians who are fighting to protect the gentle and vulnerable pangolin—the most trafficked mammal in the world
With his tail stretched out parallel to the ground for balance, Tamuda holds his little arms in front of him like aThe caretaker gently guides the young pangolin toward a dirt mound that he starts to break apart with a pick. Look, he encourages Tamuda: ants. Tamuda catches on and begins to eat, his nearly body-length tongue searching the crevices, his long claws mimicking the pick.
Young pangolins like being up high. Until they’re several months old, their mothers carry them on their backs so the babies can observe how to behave. That’s probably where Tamuda was spending most of his time just before poachers snatched him and his mother from the wild. When a pangolin mother is afraid, she rolls into a ball, protecting her soft, peach-fuzz belly and her baby with the armor of her scales.
Masked to protect their identities, law enforcement officers with Côte d’Ivoire’s organized crime unit sit atop nearly 8,000 pounds of pangolin scales seized in 2017 and 2018 and probably bound for China or Vietnam. As the four Asian pangolin species have become endangered, traffickers have turned to the African species.“Every time someone brings us a pangolin, I wonder if it’s the last one in Zimbabwe,” says Hywood, who founded the rescue center in 1994.
“In the last decade, there’s been a massive growth in intercontinental trade in pangolins, especially their scales,” says Dan Challender, chair of the pangolin specialist group with the International Union for Conservation of Nature , the global authority on the status of threatened species. Previously, most pangolin poaching and smuggling occurred within Asia, he says.
China’s pangolins had become noticeably scarce by the mid-1990s, according to some reports, because of overhunting. As demand persisted, Chinese companies continued to make pangolin products, ostensibly by turning to two legal sources of scales: stockpiles amassed from pangolins hunted within China before their numbers crashed and imports brought into the country before the bans went into place.
In all, China accounted for almost 30 percent of scale seizures globally from 2010 to 2015, according to Traffic. Keeping in mind that seizures are believed, conservatively, to represent about a quarter of actual illegal trade, these numbers suggest that hundreds of thousands of pangolins are slaughtered each year.
This hasn’t stopped Chinese businesspeople from trying. In 2013 a Chinese woman named Ma Jin Ru started a pangolin-breeding operation called Olsen East Africa International Investment Co. Ltd., in Kampala, Uganda, with a provisional permit from the Uganda Wildlife Authority and, later, with backing from a government-affiliated Chinese foundation. Not long after, a company called Asia-Africa Pangolin Breeding Research Centre was also registered and licensed in Kampala.
from Togo in 2016, aiming to study the animals under controlled conditions and establish a self-sustaining population. As of early March, 16 had died.to find in Cameroon. They’re for sale at outdoor bushmeat markets, where they lie dead next to monkeys and pythons on folding tables. They’re for sale on the sides of the roads, where vendors hold them upside down by the tails for passing drivers to see.
Young took us back to her house, which, like all the other homes on her street, was surrounded by a tall, thick wall for security. As we pulled up, I saw a boy in a school uniform, Young’s son Nathan, walking what appeared to be a dog. He was pointing his flashlight at the space between the curb and the neighbor’s wall, keeping an eye on his pet.
Young introduced us to eight-year-old Nathan and told him we were going to take a walk to the grocery store around the corner to buy some scallions. We left the pangolin under the walker’s watchful eye, and on the way Nathan talked about how much he loves pangolins and how excited he is to help them. He was clearly proud of his mom.
“More and more we are seeing wildlife products leave the central African subregion, passing through Cameroon to Nigeria, where traffickers believe wildlife law enforcement is not as strong,” Tah said.
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