Trade could spell the end for ant eater

ILLEGAL animal trafficking ranks as one of the largest sources of revenue for organised criminal gangs in Asia, and now conservationists are saying it could wipe out a species – the pangolin.

Once widespread, the shy ant eater is being vacuumed up for sale, largely in China, where many believe it can cure an array of ailments and boost sexual prowess. The last stand of the four Asian species has shrunk to Sumatra and Kalimantan in Indonesia, Palawan in the southern Philippines and parts of Malaysia and India.

“We are watching a species just slip away,” says Chris Shepard, regional director for TRAFFIC – the international wildlife trade-monitoring network – who has tracked the practice in Asia for two decades. He says a 100-fold increase is needed in efforts to save the pangolin, sometimes described as a walking pine cone.

Conservationists first took notice in the 1990s when harvesting in China and its borderlands, driven by rocketing prices, was sweeping south, decimating the slow-breeding animals in Thailand, Burma, Cambodia and Laos.

The pangolin trade – banned in 2002 by CITES, the international convention on endangered species – resembles a pyramid.

At the base are poor rural hunters, including workers on Indonesia’s vast palm oil plantations. They use dogs or smoke to flush the pangolins out or shake the solitary, nocturnal animals from trees in often protected forests.

“Everything is against them … They have no teeth. Their only defence is to roll up in a ball that fits perfectly into a bag,” Mr Shepherd says.

Middlemen set up buying stations in rural areas and deliver the animals through secretive networks to the less than dozen kingpins in Asia suspected of handling the international connections.

Factories in Sumatra butcher the pangolins, slitting their throats, then stripping off and drying the valuable scales.

The smuggling routes almost all end in China.

Pangolins from Indonesia are sent to mainland south-east Asia, then trucked up the Thai-Malaysian peninsula through Thailand and Laos to southern China.

Smugglers in the eastern Malaysian state of Sabah ship theirs to Vietnam’s seaport of Haiphong or to mainland Malaysia to join the trucking routes. From India, they pass overland through Nepal and Burma.

Ground into powder, pangolin scales are believed to cure rheumatism and skin diseases, reduce swellings, promote lactation for breast-feeding mothers and alleviate other medical problems.