The ‘walking pine cone’ blamed for spreading infection
Prince William’s favourite animal is being blamed for spreading the coronavirus. But with 300 caught daily and many sold as a delicacy for up to £11,000, the question is . . .
THE pangolin may be Prince William’s favourite beast, but it will never win a beauty contest. It is small, shy, toothless, poor- sighted, boasts a 15 in prehensile tongue rooted in its pelvis and is heavily armoured from nose to tail with dozens of hard, overlapping keratin scales: it is the world’s only scaled mammal.
It is also the most trafficked animal in the world and is now critically endangered. This is because far too many Chinese people believe its scales, when ground to a powder, can treat everything from impotence to arthritis, liver cancer to acne, and asthma to ingrown eyelashes. This, of course, is rubbish: the scales are made of keratin, just like our own hair and fingernails.
Pangolin meat, meanwhile, is served as a sign of wealth and privilege at ostentatious banquets, with the animals often killed at the table to prove they are the genuine article. Some gourmands even claim to enjoy tiny, skinned pangolin foetuses which, when floated in wine or soup, are believed to be an aphrodisiac.
To feed this revolting demand, every day, more than 300 pangolins are poached from the wild — hundreds of thousands a year in Asia and Africa — and sold alive or dead in China’s infamous exotic-animal markets.
Among these is the Huanan Seafood Market in the city of Wuhan — the suspected ground zero for the coronavirus that has swept through China and is now affecting the rest of the world, having killed more than 800 people and infected almost 40,000.
In the Wuhan market, live pangolins were, until recently, on sale alongside snakes, frogs, porcupines, live koalas, rats and wolf pups.
Chinese scientists now believe it could be the pangolin — not snakes as previously thought — that is the missing link or ‘intermediary host’ that helped transmit the infection from bats to humans and facilitated the virus’s spread.
AFTER isolating and analysing 1,000 viruses sampled from wild animals, a team from the South China Agricultural University found that the genome sequence of coronavirus in pangolins was a 99 per cent match to that of infected patients.
So what do we know about these elusive, prehistoric- looking creatures? Well, not nearly as much as we should. We do know that pangolins, which resemble pine cones on legs, are rare creatures that have been climbing trees, digging 40-metre burrows with their strong claws, swimming heroic distances and enjoying a tasty diet of insects thanks to their long, sticky tongues for 80 million years.
They are highly intelligent, nocturnal and solitary (they join forces only to mate — the male attracts the female’s attention with a pool of urine or faeces) and are so unusual they have a mammal order entirely to themselves: Pholidota.
They cannot be farmed and falter in captivity. (Over the years, more than 100 zoos have tried to keep pangolins, but the animals become too stressed to eat or drink, and most die within a year.)
As a result, very few people have ever seen them, researchers don’t even know how long they live and 92 per cent of Britons have no idea they exist.
As Prince William once put it: ‘Pangolins run the risk of becoming extinct before most people have even heard of them!’ Which would be a crying shame because they have survived for far longer than humans have been around, raiding termite mounds, gorging on up to 70 million ants each a year and hissing, puffing and lashing their sharp tails in the face of danger and, if all that fails, rolling into a ball and waiting it out.
It’s the perfect foil for hungry lions who can’t bite through the scales, but utterly hopeless in the face of a poacher. The latter needs neither guns nor traps. He just picks them up, pops them in his sack and transports them, often live and terrified, to market.
The pangolin population in China is thought to have fallen by up to 94 per cent since the Sixties, which has driven traffickers to raid populations in India, Pakistan and Africa.
Today, all eight species of pangolin are endangered, two critically.
Their scales sell for nearly £3,000 a kilogram and a single pangolin can set a diner back more than £11,000.
Back in 2016, pangolins were given the highest level of protection under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES). There are also several dedicated protection societies — including IUCN SSC Pangolin Specialist Group and
savepangolins.org — and even a World Pangolin Day this Saturday.
Celebrity supporters include Sir David Attenborough, who once said the pangolin was among the most endearing beasts he had ever handled, and Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who in 2018 was photographed jogging in a ‘Protect the Pangolin’ T-shirt and who also wrote an impassioned newspaper article about their plight.
They need all the help they can get. Because illicit hunting continues to flourish and, at current rates of attrition, the species could be wiped out within five to ten years. While many pangolins are killed, skinned and frozen before being traded on the black market (often hidden among fish and snake skins), others are kept alive and force-fed gravel to increase their weight and, therefore, value.
Last June, 4.4 tonnes of pangolin scales from Cameroon were seized in Hong Kong. In 2018, a raid at a seafood warehouse in Indonesia yielded more than 4,000 pangolins and, over the past five years, 4.7 tonnes of scales have been seized in India, where the pangolin is the most traded species.
And those are only the smugglers who got caught.
This is not the first time China has been accused of tolerating a murky trade in endangered animals for food or traditional medicines. Nor, sadly, is it uncommon for markets to exist at which wild, exotic and farmed animals are packed together and viruses can incubate and evolve.
The SARS virus that killed hundreds of people in China and Hong Kong in 2002 and 2003 was thought to have originated in bats, later reaching humans via civets — a small nocturnal mammal — which the Chinese traded live and ate.
Of course, not everyone is convinced the pangolin is the intermediary. Some experts have called for China to release more data.
Professor James Wood, an infectious diseases expert at the University of Cambridge, believes that simply reporting the similarity of the genome sequences of viruses is ‘ not sufficient’ and insisted the results could be due to ‘ contamination from a highly infected environment’.
Whatever, the pangolin is the innocent victim of China’s greed, dishonesty and ignorance.
And the real irony is that it is all based on myth, because there is no scientific evidence to suggest that the pangolin’s scales, meat or foetuses contain any special medicinal benefits whatsoever.
But that has not stopped the Chinese fuelling a massive international demand that has led to these poor, helpless creatures being tortured, killed and eaten into near extinction.
And now, quite possibly, helping to spread the killer virus that is sweeping the world.