The Roller - part 2

Graphic: WWF

In general the chain starts in the remote rural corners of Southeast Asia where opportunistic villagers bag-up rolled pangolins they happen to come across in forests. In Malaysia oil palm plantations are the most common hunting grounds, where neat, evenly spaced rows of trees make for easy spotting and capture. Buyers regularly scour the region to look for caught pangolins, and they deliver their haul to intermediaries in larger towns. 

     If the meat is to be frozen the animals are killed with a hammer blow to the head. The carcasses are quickly dunked in boiling water to make it easy to scrape off the scales, then slit open and gutted. The organs are washed, put into a plastic bag and stuffed back into the body cavity of the dead animal before it all gets frozen together. The scales are sun-dried and packed into large sacks.  Other pangolins are live-shipped, in which case they may be force fed water, or injected with fluids to bolster their weight. The value per kilogram is estimated to multiply ten fold from first capture to the Chinese dinner table.

     It is clear that the intercepted trade is only the tip of the iceberg. There is no evidence that the captured haul has dented the enthusiasm of traffickers, and one estimate puts the demand in China at up to 135,000 pangolins a year.

     

Photo: AP

How is this possible when China is a signatory to the CITES convention? The agreement puts all four Asian pangolin species on a “zero quota qualification,” which translates to no international commercial trade. Inside of China the species was still classed a Category II endangered animal as of 2014, according to the IUCN Red List. In theory that means that hunting licenses could still be granted, although the Red List states that none had been issued since protection was tightened in 2007. Crucially, however, Category II allows domestic trade in “stockpiled” goods through “designated outlets such as hospitals.” The problem is that this conservation status has not been reassessed in China since the late 1980s, when the situation looked different. Today there is one obvious flaw in Chinese tolerance for a “domestic” trade – there is practically no domestic supply, with the species likely extinct in several provinces.

     There are calls within the country to upgrade the protection for the animal to the highest national level, yet a survey in 2008 found that 80 percent of traditional medicine shops in southern China, and there are many of them in every town, offered pangolin scales. Eighteen percent of restaurants claimed to sell the meat, and the figure was as high as 40 percent in some cities such as Nanning in southern Yunnan, and Haiko on Hainan island. Since 2010 in Yunnan Province more than 2,500 kg of scales, representing nearly 4,900 pangolins, plus 220 living and 39 dead pangolins have been seized by authorities clamping down on unauthorized outlets. 

     

Photo: TRAFFIC

In April 2014 there was a glimmer of hope for the species along with other endangered animals, when the government to much fanfare announced stricter enforcement of existing laws to stop people eating illegally hunted animals. Now a person eating protected wildlife can face ten years in jail. Sounds good, but will it be effective for pangolins who are not so much hunted, as they don’t exist in China, but are smuggled across borders?

     The real problem in China seems to be that too many people believe in the magic powers of weird animals, including people involved in animal conservation.

     Here is an excerpt from a paper presented by a state official in 2008:

     “As early as the 16th century, records in Compendium of Materia Medica compiled by the prestigious herbalist Li Shizhen showed that pangolin scales are effective in eliminating turgescence, discharging purulence, dredging main and collateral channels, invigorating the circulation of blood and stimulating milk secretion.” You might imagine that the official was an anthropologist, or historian, but this came from an officer of the Endangered Species Wild Fauna Import and Export Management Office. He was presenting a paper at an international workshop in Singapore aimed at pulling together to save the pangolin from extinction.

     His paper went on to suggest that modern studies support ancient beliefs, saying pangolins can help with “tubal obstruction,” “hysterolyoma thymion” and “urinary calculus,” whatever they are. I wonder if anyone in the conference hall full of conservationists understood those obscure medical words.  The paper concluded with a disturbing contradiction, that "China has taken strict measures to regulate and control the trade in pangolin scales for medicinal use, while respecting the needs for preserving the traditional culture."

      This doesn't work. The pangolins will disappear if someone doesn't persuade wealthy people in China that there is no medical evidence for their "magic," and the scales are just matted hair. And also there is no "stockpile." Mainland demand is Hoovering up animals from surrounding countries captured and traded illegally, and that's a well-documented fact. The prevailing attitude in the mainland contrasts with Taiwan where the department of health banned pangolin scales for medicinal use in 2000, despite the same beliefs in traditional medicine. And within China the deference to “traditions” doesn't go unchallenged. 

     The forestry police department submitted a paper at the same conference stating clearly: "as long as there is a demand in the market, and available supply, wildlife crime will continue." The Category II protective status of the pangolin wasn't enough to preserve the species, and the 20-year-old classification needed to be upgraded, it said. People caught eating endangered species were let off too easily, with just nominal fines in certain provinces. "However, as wildlife consumers mainly belong to high social status groups, fines are not sufficiently deterent," the forestry police presentation bluntly noted.

     So far the trend has been that as China gets richer more pangolins are eaten. It looks like Chinese demand will kill-off Asian species, unless attitudes change. And as predicted a few years ago, the illegal trade is beginning to make an impact on Africa too, where four related species are now being targeted for the “traditional” Chinese medicine market. Hong Kong customs seized over a ton of scales in a shipping container from Kenya in May 2014, and then another three tons a month later in a shipment from Cameroon via Malaysia, according to Annamiticus.  

     But before we focus too much on Chinese beliefs it should be pointed out that belief in magic easily crosses national borders, as western alternative medicine professionals eagerly show. There are several North American websites that list the health benefits of pangolin keratine. Ying Yang House in Tenesee, USA, for example relays the information that pangolin scales can unblock menses, promote discharge of pus and expel wind-damp from the channels. Perhaps if less "wind-damp" was expelled by herbalists there may be a chance for the survival of animals like pangolins.

     But the belief in magic animals is rooted deeply in the human psyche, dating back to well before the days the Internet allowed us to find out which animals and their powers were real, and which animals were made up. To take one example, Europeans believed in unicorns for centuries. And of course if they believed in unicorns -- weird looking animals -- it follows that they believed in the magic powers of the unicorn horn, a very rare and expensive item that only royals and aristocrats could afford. The horns in fact came from a real animal just as strange as the imaginary unicorn, a narwhal. The cetacean species live in the far north, rarely seen by people other than highly specialised arctic dwellers. Some of them discovered the usefulness of the brittle narwhal spear, as fishing rods and other tools, but they also discovered that traders from the south were willing to pay good money for them. So for centuries the elongated and beautifully twisted incisors trickled into the European luxury market fetching prices as high as twenty times their weight in gold, traded as unicorn horns. So precious was the item that Queen Elizabeth I of England was said to have a narwhal sceptre, given to her by an explorer. And similar to a pangolin’s scale, the tusk ground into a powder had healing powers, from poison antidote to anti-depressant, well-paid doctors claimed.

     Luckily the narwhal survived this infatuation. The belief in unicorns faded from the minds of the more or less sane before industrialisation opened up trade roots and mass exploitation of the species became a possibility. By the time Europeans had diesel powered ice-breakers and the exploding harpoon, they had lost interest in horned cetaceans and instead focused on sperm whales, with devastating effect. Pangolins on the other hand continue to be an intensely desired commodity in the age of refrigerated transport, AK-47s, GPS and smart phones. 

     The species has been listed amongst the world’s most extraordinary and threatened animals by the Evolutionarily Distinct and Globally Endangered (EDGE) organisation. But conservationists fear that little is being done to save them. Michael Lau of WWF told me about field surveys he did in southern China, where he failed to find fresh burrows in Guangdong, Guangxi or Hainan. Camera trap studies yielded equally poor results, forcing many biologists to suspect the worst about the fate of the Chinese pangolin in its namesake country. “Enforcement needs to be stepped up, and demand needs to be addressed. They cannot be raised in captivity, all consumption is from the wild ones,” he told me. Elsewhere, another zoologist was emphatic: “unless efforts are taken to address both demand for, and supply of pangolins, they will go extinct in Asia in the short term future,” Dan Challender told Agence France-Presse.

     In this depressing picture of an animal pushed to the brink, largely because of bad science and a misplaced defence of “cultural heritage,” there is a strange, little understood and utterly unexpected beacon of hope. That beacon is Hong Kong.

     “Hong Kong probably has one of the best populations in the region,” Lau told me. Good forest re-growth and the fact that they are mostly left unmolested for now provide two basic requirements for a species surprisingly adaptable to changing environments despite its rarity. If they can eat ants and they are left alone, they’ll plod on, seems to be the message from the few people in the world who have had time to look closely at this weirdly unglamorous species.

A HK pangolin caught in the AFCD camera trap survey

      But we know very little about them, and that’s another reason why the Hong Kong population should be carefully protected. The academic literature on pangolins is written in a list of potentials, and gaps in knowledge. We hardly know anything, including real population densities, size of home ranges, how families are organized, the precise mating season, age at sexual maturity, the period of gestation and maternal care. Studies in captivity conclude they are thoroughly unhappy in a cage and tend to injure themselves trying to escape, and any findings can’t be made sense of until there is better knowledge of what they do in the wild. We just don’t know these animals that are being packed and crated in their thousands for the massive underground trade.

     Hong Kong could play a role in plugging that knowledge gap. Ecological studies here would help to formulate a plan to protect them throughout their range. Understanding pangolins is also key to understanding the indigenous ecology of the territory, as millions of years of interaction between pangolins, their insect prey and native flora has shaped the land. But of course a study like that would depend on luck not running out for Hong Kong’s pangolins.

     The international poaching threat can only grow as economic pressures work on a depleted population. One of the last wild pangolins Lau saw in Hong Kong was a dead one caught in an illegal trap. They’ve been hunted out of the wider region, and the cash value of their flesh and scales only goes up. Traders have been going further a field, more deeply into the wild heart of Borneo, Sumatra and South Asia, and now Africa. When will they simply turn around and clean up in gentle Hong Kong? 

     Lau reckons that there is a real risk that pangolins here will be targeted systematically in the future.  The territory has already seen poachers bundling rare Buddha pines and incense trees onto high powered speedboats, and racing the coastguard across the mainland border. There is also the illegal trapping of the indigenous golden coin turtle, another magic animal worth thousands on the medicinal and ornamental market. Lau says we should protect our rare population with frequent patrols, to stop illegal trapping and hunting from taking root here. The pangolins may need a little bit of magic to save themselves from disappearing off the face of the planet, but then again Herklots might think it was miraculous that they are still here at all.