Taste For Rare, Wild Pangolin Is Driving The Mammal To Extinction : The Salt

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hide captionA government
official releases a rescued baby pangolin into the Sumatran forest in
July 2012 after Indonesian police intercepted 85 endangered pangolins.

AFP/Getty Images

Traditional Chinese medicine holds
that the scales of a pangolin, a small ant-eating mammal, are "cool"
and "salty." Eating those scales, the TCM thinking goes, may help expel
wind, reduce swelling and boost lactation. But pangolin scales also seem
to induce something far less beneficial: rapacity.

A recent report
from the International Union for Conservation of Nature, or IUCN, warns
that the pangolin is "literally being eaten out of existence." Demand
not just for scales but also for pangolin meat in East and Southeast
Asia has produced a thriving illegal pangolin market.


All eight species of pangolin are threatened by extinction, with
two critically endangered. And unlike many other endangered species,
whose relatively small habitats are threatened by urbanization, pangolin
can be found over a wide swath of the planet: practically all of South
and Southeast Asia and much of sub-Saharan Africa.

So why the sudden rapacious appetite for pangolin?

Dan Challender, who co-chairs IUCN's Pangolin Specialist Group,
says that in recent years "the dynamic of [pangolin] consumption has
changed." Once a supplemental protein source for people in rural
villages, it has become a luxury food for newly-rich urbanites, prized
precisely because it must be caught in the wild. "In Vietnam and China,"
Challender says, "wild meat is considered very good. It's treated
differently from farmed meat ... It's a natural product. There's an
attachment to it."

This distinguishes pangolin from shark fin,
for instance — a traditional luxury food that became more widely
consumed as more people could afford luxuries. Pangolin consumption
seems driven by both urban nostalgie de la boue (the same thing
that makes it impossible to swing a handmade banjo in Brooklyn without
hitting a farm-to-table restaurant), and by its rarity.

IUCN
has come up with an admirably broad plan to halt pangolins' slide into
extinction by trying to stem both supply and demand. The former is
well-intentioned and politically necessary, but may be waste of time.
China and Vietnam are already signatories to CITES, an international treaty that on paper (and apparently only on paper) prohibits trade in endangered species. That has not stopped the trade in tigers, rhinos, or, for that matter, pangolins.




The action is on the demand side, which is much trickier: Getting
governments to sign a popular treaty is easy; changing the behavior of
millions of status-conscious consumers is much harder. But it's not
impossible.







An anti-shark-fin campaign run by WWF's Hong Kong chapter names corporations that refuse to serve shark-fin soup at their events and also lists caterers who provide fin-free banquets. WWF-HK claims
that the volume of shark fin imported into Hong Kong declined by nearly
35 percent from 2012 to 2013. China began a three-year phase-out of
shark fin at its state banquets; they too have avowed a dramatic drop in shark-fin sales.

Pangolins
are often consumed as business deals are made. Challender suggests that
one promising approach would be to get a large corporation to forswear
wild-meat consumption during contract signings. The IUCN's also calls
for digital-media campaigns, engaging foundations in
pangolin-conservation and engaging "the arts community to promote the
plight of pangolins."

Let me offer a poem: "That's a pangolin/Don't stuff it in/Your mouth."