REMOVAL FROM LIST OF MEDICINE INGREDIENTS A FIRST STEP IN PROTECTING PANGOLINS

WHEN Corona begins to stir, Leno Sierra hears her almost immediately. The large wooden box housing the Temminck’s pangolin is right next to her bedroom at the Manyoni Private Game Reserve in Kwazulu-natal.

“They start scratching. You can hear them moving inside the box,” explains Sierra, the Zululand field manager for the African Pangolin Working Group (APWG). “Usually she wakes up because she poos in the box.”

Dutifully, Sierra cleans it, gently moving Corona to another clean, towel-padded wooden box, where Corona settles for an hour or so. “I wait for her to start scratching again and whenever she’s ready, I get ready to get out and go feed her in the reserve.”

Corona was named after the novel coronavirus when she was rescued from the illegal wildlife trade in a police sting in Midrand in early February at the start of the outbreak. Weak and emaciated, she was nursed back to health and rehabilitated by devoted staff at the Johannesburg Wildlife Veterinary Hospital for two months. In early April, she arrived at Manyoni, as part of her extended “soft release” programme.

Corona is weighed before and after her daily two to three-hour foraging session on the Big 5 reserve. “We want to get her to the ideal weight before we can release her… We drive to this beautiful open area, which is big enough to see if predators are close by, that’s full of termite mounds. We call it Las Vegas and she’s been feeding beautifully there lately,” Sierra says, describing how an armed ranger is always present.

“In the beginning, I carried a big pick to help her open a nest. Now I only carry a small handpick to help her open a particular termite mound that’s too hard.”

Sierra jokes she is the pangolin’s slave. “She’s totally a teenager pangolin now,” she laughs.

For the last year that the Mexican conservationist has worked in the APWG’S release programme for trafficked pangolins, the enigmatic mammals have “bewitched” her.

“It’s unbelievable. I never expected that I was going to be lucky enough to be in touch with a species that was so unknown, mysterious, incredible and so odd. Now the world is getting to know them and we’re realising how special and different these animals are.”

Shy and mysterious, pangolins, or scaly anteaters, are the most heavily trafficked mammals on Earth with all eight species – four in Africa and four in Asia – threatened with extinction. Pangolins are mostly hunted for their scales, which is used in traditional

WHILE the Chinese government appears to have removed endangered pangolins from a list of key raw traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) ingredients, “it’s not yet clear whether pangolins have also been removed from a separate section of the pharmacopoeia as an ingredient in approved patent medicines”, says the London-based Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA).

The pangolin is the most trafficked mammal in the world and their scales are in high demand for use in TCM. “Despite consumption of pangolin meat being officially banned in China, licensed hospitals and pharmaceutical companies have been permitted to use pangolin scales in traditional medicines – a practice regarded as a major driver in the transnational trafficking of pangolins from across Africa and Asia into China.”

The EIA says if approved patent medicine formulae in the pharmacopoeia containing pangolin have not been removed or amended, “it would mean the pharmacopoeia would continue to promote and legitimise medicinal use of pangolins”.

“This has happened before – neither leopard bone nor bear bile are now included in the ‘key ingredients’ section of the pharmacopoeia, yet are still listed among ingredients for patent medicines and so their legal commercial use continues.”

In China, it says, legal trade in medicinal products is not always restricted to ingredients and patent medicines listed in the pharmacopoeia. It has documented products in legal trade, which list leopard bone as an ingredient, and which are not included in the official directory. “These questions need to be clarified and backed up by official policy announcements before we can celebrate a total ban on China’s domestic trade in pangolins.

“However, the move is being interpreted as an acknowledgment from China of the need to address the use of pangolin scales in TCM to protect pangolins in the wild.”

The uplisting, says the EIA, does not automatically mean that domestic trade in these species is completely outlawed since exemptions allowing their use in TCM could still apply. | SHEREE BEGA “However, these products are reasonably well regulated by the Chinese authorities so it will be difficult to manufacture, distribute and sell merchandise containing pangolin derivatives such as scales.”

This will lead to a huge reduction in sourcing and trading pangolins globally as the TCM market is the source for as much as 80% of all poached pangolins.

During 2019,, in a pioneering reintroduction programme, the APWG released seven poached Temminck’s pangolins into Phinda Private Game Reserve. Pangolins have been locally extinct in Kwazulu-natal for the past 30 years.

Of the seven, five have survived – one perished from biliary caused by severe tick bite fever while another was killed by a crocodile.

“We expanded our release programme to Manyoni, which neighbours Phinda, because Phinda is getting full. We’ve done three pangolins releases at Manyoni,” Jansen explains.

The pangolins reintroduced into Kwazulu-natal, like Corona, were all rescued from the illicit trade in Gauteng. “For all the Gauteng pangolins we retrieve, we don’t know where they’re from – Mozambique, Zimbabwe or Botswana – and we take them to KZN.”

Corona is “doing fantastically” and “putting on huge weight” – she is just over 6kg now. “For just under two years we’ve done these soft releases and the survival rate has increased dramatically. We ease them in to get used to the area, to find enough food to forage on and to find burrows.”

The soft release usually takes a week but for Corona, it will last four months. “Corona is still too small. She needs to get 6.5kg and so we’re just going to get through the worst part of winter - the cold is very hard on them - and hopefully in August, when it starts warming up a little, she’ll have her full release.

“We also fit them with satellite and VHF transmitters and they can’t be too small to carry those. We monitor them for a year.”

Locally, the APWG has dealt with around 10 pangolin trafficking cases so far this year, similar to 2017. The lower figure may be due to the lockdown.

“It’s bizarre,” says Jansen. “Two of the pangolins were just found walking in the road in townships areas – we think they’re escapees from the trade.

“Another guy just brought one in and confessed. The guys are struggling to sell them.

“The international trade has crashed. We have word that in the DRC, Nigeria and Vietnam, they’re stockpiling pangolin scales.”