Why Are Pangolins Trafficked? The Scale Trade Explained

Demand for pangolin scales

A pangolin’s body is covered from head to tail in hard, overlapping scales. For centuries these scales have been dried, roasted and ground for use in traditional medicine, especially in China and Vietnam, and to a lesser extent in other parts of Asia and in Africa.

Sellers claim the scales help nursing mothers produce milk, improve blood circulation or treat skin problems and other ailments. None of these claims is supported by scientific evidence. The scales are made of keratin, the same protein found in human fingernails, hair and rhino horn, and people cannot digest it.

Because the scales of a single animal weigh relatively little, the trade needs huge numbers of pangolins. Large seizures are often measured in tonnes, which can represent thousands of animals in a single shipment.

Pangolin meat as a luxury food

The second driver is meat. In parts of China and Vietnam, pangolin has been served in restaurants as an expensive delicacy, eaten to show wealth and status rather than out of need. Its rarity and illegality can make it more attractive to some buyers, which is one reason demand is hard to reduce.

In West and Central Africa, pangolins are also hunted as bushmeat, the meat of wild animals eaten locally, and their body parts are used in traditional healing. Research in Nigeria has suggested that hunting for meat, rather than for scales, is the main cause of local declines there.

Why pangolins are so easy to catch

Pangolins evolved to deal with lions, leopards and tigers, not people. Their main defense is to roll into a tight, armored ball that big cats struggle to open. Against a human, that strategy fails completely: a poacher can simply pick up the curled animal and drop it into a sack. How the defense works, and why it backfires, is explained in how do pangolins protect themselves.

Pangolins also breed slowly. Most females have a single young at a time, so populations cannot recover quickly once hunting removes adults. Hunters often use dogs to track them by scent, and they are taken opportunistically when people come across them in forests and plantations.

Which pangolins are trafficked?

All eight recognized species are affected. In Asia, the Sunda pangolin and the Chinese pangolin were hit first and hardest, and both are now listed as Critically Endangered by the IUCN, alongside the Philippine pangolin. As Asian populations collapsed, traffickers increasingly turned to the four African species.

Since the mid-2010s, many of the largest seizures have involved scales shipped from Nigeria and neighboring countries to ports in Asia. In April 2019, for example, authorities in Singapore intercepted two shipments within a week that together held about 25 tonnes of pangolin scales, among the largest seizures on record.

How big is the pangolin trade?

Exact numbers are impossible to know, because only a fraction of illegal shipments is ever found. The IUCN’s pangolin specialists estimated that more than one million pangolins were taken from the wild in the decade before 2014. Since then, the number of seizures and the weight of scales confiscated have remained very high.

Some well-known cases show the scale of the problem:

Each of these represents thousands of animals taken from forests and savannas.

What laws protect pangolins?

International trade in pangolins is controlled by CITES, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora. In 2016, at a meeting in Johannesburg, member countries agreed to move all eight pangolin species to Appendix I, which bans commercial international trade in wild animals and their parts. The ban took effect in early 2017.

Pangolins are also protected by national laws in almost every country where they live. In 2020, China raised all pangolin species to its highest level of legal protection and removed pangolin scales from the official list of ingredients in its national pharmacopoeia, although some approved medicines continued to contain them.

Is the trade slowing down?

Not clearly. Stronger laws, more customs checks and public campaigns have raised awareness, and some large trafficking networks have been prosecuted. But demand persists, enforcement varies from country to country, and traffickers shift routes when one is closed.

Conservationists argue that cutting demand is as important as catching smugglers. That means persuading consumers that scales do not work as medicine and that eating pangolin drives a unique animal toward extinction. The same lesson has come from the ivory trade, described in are elephants endangered.

How you can help

The most effective things anyone can do are simple: never buy pangolin meat, scales, leather or medicines containing pangolin, and report suspected wildlife crime to the police or wildlife authorities. Learning the basics helps too. Many people still assume pangolins are reptiles; in fact they are mammals, as explained in are pangolins reptiles.