On the trail of the pangolin poachers
Setting up a sting to catch animal traffickers and save an endangered species
THE “middleman” was driving from central Joburg and the pangolin poachers were travelling from Tembisa.
The meeting point: the Shell Ultra City on the N1 in Midrand.
At a nearby shopping mall, just hours before the sting operation last Tuesday, Ray Jansen, the founder of the African Pangolin Working Group (APWG), and police operatives were tracking the gang’s movements by phone.
“I’m always pumped on adrenalin before these operations,” smiled the tall, lean Jansen, puffing deeply on an electronic cigarette. “You don’t sleep the night before.”
As always, the zoology professor at the Tshwane University of Technology was posing as a “buyer” of the trafficked pangolin, after a tip-off from a member of the public in the Lowveld, who had been offered the pangolin for an undisclosed sum.
“The member of the public called the Polokwane endangered species unit, who called me. It’s a fantastic team. We have guys from Kimberley, KwaZulu-Natal, North West and Limpopo, all working together.”
Via the middleman, Jansen had been sent videos of the mammal, a Temminck’s pangolin, snatched from the wild in Zimbabwe and smuggled into South Africa, providing “proof of life”. They showed the pangolin curled on the floor of a shack in Tembisa, with the date and time of each video scrawled on scraps of paper, placed on the endangered animal’s protective, overlapping scales.
“You’ve formed a bond with this animal already through the videos. If we lose one of this species, it’s one too many. Then they’re gone for ever from this planet.”
Enigmatic and docile, pangolins, or scaly anteaters, have existed for 85 million years but today are the most heavily trafficked mammal on earth.
The shy, elusive and little-known animals are largely trafficked for their scales, believed to treat several health ailments in traditional Chinese medicine, while in Vietnam and China they are consumed as a luxury food, which has created a lucrative black market run by transnational criminal syndicates.
Pangolins made headlines last week when researchers at the South China Agricultural University linked them in the carrying and transmission of the coronavirus. For Jansen, while the findings remain preliminary, the world’s most trafficked mammal “may very well now receive the respect, attention and conservation it deserves only because humans are now directly affected in a bizarre turn of events.”
Last year, the APWG rescued 36 pangolins from the claws of the illicit trade. This gang didn’t know it, but a carefully constructed intelligence-led operation had been set up between the APWG, the Gauteng Green Scorpions, the SAPS stock theft and endangered species unit, the Bronkhorstspruit K9 unit and a covert unit of crime intelligence, who were already deployed at the Shell Ultra City.
On January 28, the same sting had been meticulously planned but the gang never pitched.
“They were moering each other, fighting between themselves over who is going to get what… I told the middleman that if he dropped me, he won’t see me again, ever,” said Jansen.
But the fate of the pangolin haunted Jansen for days. “I was taking huge strain – I couldn’t stop thinking about this pangolin.”
In January, poachers of another pangolin offered to Jansen “went underground. They went quiet and I knew that pangolin had died”.
Then, on February 2, the middleman called Jansen again. “He said he had seen the pangolin twice and it was strong. He tried to set another price, but I told him I’m not talking money.”
In cases like these, where the stressed, traumatised animals have been held captive without adequate sustenance, they typically perish. “In the videos, the pangolin was doing really well. But remember, it’s on full adrenaline. They’re walking like a demon but they’re on their last reserves. They actually collapse in the hospital. When you anaesthetise these pangolins, it’s just skin and bone. Then they start crashing and burning. They (the traffickers) are also realising it’s going to die and that they’re only going to get a little bit of money for the scales from traditional healers.”
For Jansen, cultivating a good relationship with the middleman is vital to rescuing the pangolin. “You’ve got to get under their skin and have them in your pocket. When we arrest these guys, their eyes are like this,” he widened his eyes, as if in surprise. “They’re like, ‘Brother, what did you do to me?’”
That’s what happened at the Shell Ultra City. After a 45-minute game of cat-and-mouse, the middleman finally put the trafficked mammal in Jansen’s boot. The size of a small dog, the pangolin was stuffed inside a dusty black rucksack, wound tightly in a ball.
Jansen put his hands on his head as a signal for the police units to move in and all six suspects were arrested.
“I love working with these guys,” grinned Fanie Masango, of the Gauteng Green Scorpions. “It’s a brilliant team. Our cases are watertight.”
The pangolin was placed inside a “pangolin box” where later, Glen
Thompson, of the APWG’s counter poaching unit, showed her belly, which was as white as cream. “It should be pink underneath. This shows that she is very dehydrated.”
“There will be a long process of rehabilitation that will take months,” added Anika Verwey, of the same unit. “But it’s worth it. I get goosebumps thinking of the day they’re released back into the wild. It’s very special.”
Jansen felt “massively relieved,” he said. “They know they’re safe now. There’s not that loud music, the cigarette smoke, there’s not that familiar scent. They know they’re not in the trade any more and they relax immediately. I’ve had pangolins uncurl in my lap in front of the poachers. The poachers just stare, like ‘Hey it didn’t do that for me.’ It’s safe now. It gets me every time.”
Addressing the suspects, Jansen asked: “Why are you guys trading in these animals? Why don’t you just leave them alone? Jissus, you know one day there’s not going to be any left.”
The young pangolin is now recovering at a veterinary hospital. “She is okay but she is very thin,” Jansen said this week. “She weighed in at 4.92kg and she should be closer to 6kg.
“She is definitely the same one as I was supposed to retrieve a week earlier as she is so emaciated, has extremely soft feet and is generally very weak – we estimate she has been in captivity in excess of two weeks.”
Attempts to find other pangolins from the same middleman did not materialise. “The middleman could not help us as there were other middlemen, in fact, a chain of them down the line so he has no more information to share about the other two pangolins captive somewhere in Gauteng.
“All the suspects are in custody and will appear before a magistrate soon. We will oppose bail for all six but strongly oppose bail for the four Zimbabwean nationals – they will flee if they get bail and we’ll never see them again.”
Being involved in these sting operations, said Jansen, was the “sharp side of a double-edged sword. “You’re creating this market trying to catch them. Word goes out on the bush telegraph that you’re wealthy and rich and offering this much and – boom – we’re just seeing this implosion of the pangolin trade. We’ve got to shut this trade down.”