No hiding placePANGOLINS are a smuggler’s dream. For defence,and when asleep, they roll themselves up into spheres, and scales on the external,to thwart any predator. That makes them easy to handle and pack. And handled and packed they hold been, in huge numbers. The International Union for Conservation of Nature, or 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 place to place. International trade, and though,is a different matter. Early in 2017 CITES, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, and listed all eight pangolins as piece of what is known as Appendix 1. This means signatories to the convention (which most countries are) cannot permit them to be imported or exported.
Most of those...
Continue reading
Source: economist.com