Pangolins – scaly, toothless anteaters – are being poached incessantly from their native Southeast Asia habitats. TRAFFIC, the wildlife trade monitoring network, announced that the rising demand for Pangolin meat and scales, mostly from mainland China, is driving the disappearance of these shy animals.
The sheer size of recent Pangolin seizures is alarming:
They include 24 tonnes of frozen pangolins from Sumatra, Indonesia, seized in Viet Nam and 14 tonnes of frozen animals seized in Sumatra in 2008.
(Note: 1 metric ton = 2,204.6 pounds)
Earlier this year, 45 Pangolins were found in the possession of Thai smugglers.
Despite being prohibited from trade by CITES, the laws created to protect Pangolins are not strongly enforced:
The key to tackling the pangolin crisis is better enforcement of existing national and international laws designed to protect pangolins, better monitoring of the illegal trade, and basic research to find where viable pangolin populations still exist and whether ravaged populations can recover given adequate protection.
Pangolins play a vital ecological role as natural pest controllers – a service worth millions of dollars a year.
Image source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/bakau64/ / CC BY 2.0
About Rhishja Cota-Larson
It is a very sad news considering that pangolins are such rare in occurence.