Why an ancient armored mammal needs better defenses

Why an ancient armored mammal needs better defenses

 

HONG KONG–“We have uncovered disturbing information which strongly suggests that ‘medicinal use’ pangolin farms are already operating in China,”  said Project Pangolin founders Rhishja Cota-Larson and Sarah Pappin on January 16,  2012.

 

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“The emergence of pangolin farming,”  Cota-Larson and Pappin suggested,  “may help provide insight into why the world is losing pangolins at such an alarming rate–an estimated 40,000 killed in 2011– and why China’s appetite for pangolins continues to increase.” As with bear bile and tiger farming,  the growth of a captive population enables sellers to encourage customers to buy more pangolin products,  even as the exploited species disappears from the wild.

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The conservation aspect of the disappearance of pangolins has drawn the most attention so far,   but the suffering of individual pangolins is considerable.  Most pangolins taken from the wild are transported to markets and sold alive,  if the poachers can keep them alive.  This is also believed to be the fate of farmed pangolins.  If pangolins die in transport or markets,  their remains are frozen and sold.

What is a pangolin?

A survey of U.S. zoogoers done 20 or 30 years ago reputedly found that most misidentified the word “pangolin” as a musical instrument,  but many imagined that poaching to get an animal part used to make the instrument might be pushing a rare species toward extinction.   Also called scaly anteaters,  pangolins under 20 years ago remained common across much of Asia and Africa.

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But the possibly apocryphal pangolin-is-an-instrument story, told to U.S. zoo docent classes to emphasize the need to improve zoological education,  appears to have included two nuggets of truth. Most Americans and Europeans do not know what a pangolin is, having never seen one.  And pangolins are now seldom seen anywhere except in Chinese live markets.  Only the most furtive,  nocturnal, and highest-climbing pangolins survive in much of their former habitat–if any survive at all.

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Resembling a long-tailed armadillo with the semi-arboreal habits of an opossum, pangolins are believed to have emerged in the Paleocene epoch,  circa 60 million years ago.  Evolutionary geneticist Gene McCarthy of Macroevolution.net argues that pangolins and armadillos might even both be descendants of stegosaurs and ankylosaurs,  two dinosaur families whom McCarthy contends were synapsid proto-mammals,  not reptiles.

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Pangolins are toothless.  Of peaceable disposition,  except toward the ants and termites who make up most of their diet in the wild,  pangolins’ chief defense against predation is to roll into a tightly armored ball.  This was more effective against sabretoothed cats and cave bears than against human collectors.

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Pangolins have long been hunted for meat and for the purported medicinal qualities of their scales.  Formed of keratin, the same material as fingernails,  pangolin scales were sometimes used to make armor in medieval China.  But until increasing affluence in southern China drove market demand for pangolins up in recent decades,  pangolins remained relatively abundant.  Poaching and trafficking have now depleted pangolin populations to the point that the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species in 2002 prohibited selling pangolins across national borders.  The International Union for the Conservation of Nature lists several regional pangolin subspecies as endangered.

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“We found that pangolin farming is promoted as an investment opportunity due to continued high demand from the traditional Chinese medicine industry,”  reported Cota-Larson and Pappin.  “In an article discussing how the scarcity of endangered species has created a bottleneck for traditional Chinese medicine production,  the China Association of Traditional Chinese Medicine web site notes that progress is being made,   now that bear farming has been industrialized and pangolin breeding has shown signs of a dawn.  On the Chinese financial news website Eastmoney.com,  there is a page discussing the potential for pangolin breeding,  in response to estimated annual demand for 300,000 pangolins per year.”

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A plea bargain in Malaysia on January 6,  2012 sent Philippine pangolin trafficker Aivon Vencer,  20,  to jail for three years,  a month after Vencer was caught in the act of trying to smuggle 1,068 frozen pangolin carcasses out of the country by boat.

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That was reportedly the biggest seizure of pangolin meat yet, but was scarcely an isolated case.  Indonesian Forestry Ministry director of investigations and forest observation Raffles Panjaitan in October 2011 told the Jakarta Post that his agency had recorded 587 cases of pangolin trafficking since 2006,  involving an estimated $4.3 million USD worth of pangolins on the illegal market.  Major pangolin trafficking arrests have also come recently in far eastern India,  Thailand,  and Tibet,  where People’s Daily Online recently mentioned frequent seizures of pangolins and illegal drugs by the Lhasa Customs Office at Zhangmu,  on the China/Nepal border in the Tibet Autonomous Region.

Bear bile

Pangolin farming,  if able to produce pangolins in volume at competitive prices,  may become as entrenched as raising bears for bile and caged tigers for their bones.  Bear bile farming,  involving keeping bears immobilized in coffin-sized cages while their gall bladders are tapped for bile,  emerged as an industry in North Korea barely 30 years ago,  but soon became established in South Korea, China,  and Vietnam,  as well,  recently spreading to Laos.

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The World Wildlife Fund subsidiary TRAFFIC in 2011 reported finding bear bile products in more than 50% of traditional medicine shops that investigators visited in China,  Hong Kong,  Malaysia, Myanmar and Vietnam,  and in more than 30% of the traditional medicine shops visited in Japan,  South Korea,  Taiwan and Thailand. Bear bile products were also found for sale in Cambodia,  Laos,  and Singapore.

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Operating sanctuaries for bears freed from bile farms in China and Vietnam,  the Animals Asia Foundation has generated public and poltical support which appears to have caused the bear bile industry to contract and consolidate.  Nineteen of the 31 Chinese provinces and administrative districts now have no bile farms; 18 have pledged to not allow any.  The total number of bile farms has fallen from 480 to 68.  But the number of bears caged on bile farms remains around 7,000.

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The Animals Asia Foundation and an organization called China SOS Help are currently fighting the second attempt in two years by the 12-year-old firm Guizhentang Pharmaceuticals to raise expansion capital with a public stock offering.   Now keeping 470 bears, Guizhentang Pharmaceuticals seeks to expand up to 1,200.  “Bai Yipeng,  founder of China SOS Help,  bought shares of the drug company in order to oppose its going public,” Jin Zhu and Tan Zongyang of China Daily reported on February 10,  2012.  “The offer for Guizhentang’s shares could be as much as $19 million,  more than twice as much as last year,  according to a report in China Security Journal,” Jin Zhu and Tan Zongyang said.

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In Vietnam,  bear bile farming has for two years been technically illegal,  but continues through legal loopholes and lax enforcement.  The Quang Ninh provincial administration in January 2012 asked police to discourage travel agencies from taking visitors to buy bear bile products at bile farms.  The Quang Ninh request to police  followed a March 2011 request to the travel agencies to refrain from bear bile-related tourism.

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The Singapore-based organization ACRES expects to open a bear sanctuary in Laos,  similar to those of the Animals Asia Foundation, in June 2012.  The ACRES sanctuary will start with holding capacity for 29 bears,  of the estimated 100 to 200 bears kept for bile in Laos,  and will expand as needed to keep as many bears as can be freed.

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Farming tigers for bone and other body parts has never actually been legal anywhere,  but China and Thailand,  in particular,  have numerous “tiger zoos” where large numbers of tigers are bred in the name of conservation.  Mortality among the tigers is high,  often because tigers are starved,  and shops on the premises that sell tiger bone wine and other tiger products are frequently the most visible revenue stream for the “zoos,”  some of which also feature live feedings of livestock to tigers.
–MC