Move to demystify medicinal qualities of keratin
IN A rescue centre, the pangolin slowly wakes and uncurls, sniffing out a nighttime feast of ants’ eggs, then lapping it up with its implausibly long tongue. One of 74 pangolins rescued from the back of a truck in Vietnam in April, its survival has defied the odds.
This almost mystical creature, looking like a cross between an anteater and an armadillo, but unrelated to either, is the world’s most trafficked mammal: a million of them are thought to have been poached from the wild in just a decade.
Already almost wiped out in China, the pangolin is fast disappearing from the jungles of the rest of Asia and, increasingly, from Africa, to supply China’s booming market in traditional medicine.
Now, as China pushes to export traditional medicine around the world under the umbrella of its Belt and Road investment plan, many wildlife experts fear that the animal faces extinction.
“Traditional Chinese medicine should be a healing force for good, but not at the expense of animal cruelty or the extinction of species,” said Iris Ho, of the Humane Society International.
China’s decision to ban the ivory trade at the end of last year gave hope to those battling elephant poaching, “but the real litmus test lies within China’s action – or lack of action – in pangolin conservation,” Ho said.
The air of mystery attaching to the reclusive pangolin has been its downfall, sparking an unjustified belief that its scales have magical medicinal properties.
Mothers take powdered pangolin scales to help them lactate, while men drink pangolin blood or consume foetuses in the belief that this will make them more virile.
The use of pangolins in Chinese medicine dates back thousands of years: A 16th-century document recommends eating their scales to reduce swelling, invigorate blood circulation and promote lactation. A 1938 article in Nature suggests they were used to treat malaria, deafness, “hysterical crying” in children and women possessed by “devils and ogres”.
In fact, the scales are made of keratin, a fibrous protein that is the main ingredient of hair, feathers, claws and hoofs throughout the animal kingdom; patients might as well chew their own fingernails.
Customs officials make regular seizures at China’s ports, but the very size of those captures makes depressing reading, representing tens of thousands of slaughtered pangolins. Secretive pangolin “farms” in China are basically fronts for trafficking operations, experts say. And reports of Chinese companies trying to open pangolin “farms” in Africa, and of scales being prescribed by Chinese doctors in places like South Africa and the US, have intensified conservationists’ fears. – Washington Post