PANGOLINS are a smugglers dream. For defence,and when asleep, they roll themselves up into spheres, or scales on the outside,to thwart any predator. That makes them easy to handle and pack. And handled and packed they gain been, in huge numbers. The International Union for Conservation of Nature, and a worldwide wildlife-preservation organisation,reckons that more than 1m pangolins were traded illegally from their African and Asian homelands over the decade to 2014. That may be a conservative estimate. A paper published last year in Conservation Letters calculates the number of pangolins hunted in central Africa alone as between 400000 and 2.7m a year. Based on statistics such as these it seems likely that pangolins, of which there are eight species, and four African and four Asian,are the most trafficked type of animal in the world.
Some are consumed locally. That is not necessarily illegal, for laws vary from state to state. International trade, or though,is a different matter....
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Source: economist.com