Page 77 - BBC Wildlife Volume 36 #04

PANGOLINS

PROFITING FROM PANGOLINS

We have long harvested the animmals for myriad uses… many spurious.
HISTORICAL USES
O Pangolin meat was a valuable
food source in Asia and Africa for
thousands of years.
O Historical reports describe
physicians in Asia using pangolin
scales to cure all sorts of ailments,
from “bile disturbances” to cholera.
O Just as pangolins use scales to
protect themselves, so artisanss
m
crafted elaborate body armourrfrom
pangolin scales in China.
MODERN USES
O Today, culinary uses of pangolins
range from bushmeat in Africa
to delicacies in high-end Asian
restaurants.They’re even used
d
to make‘pangolin wine’.
Scales (below)
have been used by
O Pangolin body parts are stillll different cultures
used in traditional medicines to make hats and
across Africa and Asia, and falsely headdresses
believed to have medicinal and (above).
aphrodisiac properties.

O Pangolin scales are now trafficked
Top left: Dutch collector left: Seba compared the to the USA because they contain
Albertus Seba described mammals tosnakes and
African and Asian pangolin lizards, no doubt due to Tramadol HCL, a material for
specimens, mistaking them their scaly exteriors and synthesising the dangerously
for armadillos.Above and extremely long tongues. addictive illegaldrug crystal
methamphetamine.

At the start of the 17th century, there were definite + FIND OUT MORE that were more practically useful, such as whales, or of
accounts of “scaly lizards” in the East Indies, Taiwan, India higher status, such as lions andgiant pandas, became
O Pangolins will
and Goa, and of armadillos in the West Indies, Brazil and more ubiquitously familiar and are now higher up the
feature in the
‘America’. By the end of the century, these earlier books had 2018 series of conservation priority list. There is also the unfortunate
been compiled into collection catalogues or encyclopedias NaturalWorld on fact that cute and cuddly tends to win public hearts
that tried to include all creatures in existence. The scaly, BBC Two – check over the scaly and reptilian.
RadioTimes for
armoured, ball-rolling, reptile-mammals from the two We might, however, beabletousethe pangolins’
details.
Indies, eastern and western, started to get confused. strangeness to their advantage. For something else that
O Learn more
The prolific Dutch collector Albertus Seba, for example, about pangolin hasn’t changed is our fascination with the monstrous
described specimens of the “African armadillo” and conservationat andbizarre. There might– just – be enough desire
“Oriental armadillo”. He also pictured pangolin skins, www.zsl.org/ to stop the world’s more unusual inhabitants from
pangolin
labelled “armadillos”, from Brazil, Java and Taiwan. The disappearing, for the very reason that they show us
armadilloand pangolin hadbecome pan-global scaly just how fantastical nature can be.
mammals, the exotic taxonomic oddities that helped or Perhaps we need to harness that sense of the marvellous
hindered colonial operations in the Indies of East and so familiar to 17th-century travellers and naturalists in the
West. It was only in the late 18th century that theyfinally ever-expanding, wonder-filled world they inhabited. Strange
became disentangled again. and seemingly fabulous creatures such as pangolins, which
after all resemble bizarre animated pine cones, might yet
STRANGE ENOUGH TO SAVE? help us to preserve our magic-filled world today.
Their odd, hybrid natures made pangolins, or ‘scaly
lizards’, into indistinct creatures in European eyes. It NATALIE LAWRENCE is a historian of science
seems they still are. Perhaps people’s intuitive waysof who researched pangolins for her PhD. She is
understanding nature change little over time: species writing a book about our changing perceptions
that don’t fit easily into categories confuse us. Creatures of exotic beasts; www.themanticore.wordpress.com
April 2018 BBC Wildlife 77