Wishing you and yours a fabulous holiday season from Project Pangolin! Thank you to everyone who is helping to spread the word and raise awareness about these amazing creatures.
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A wild goose chase on the high seas off Sabah, Malaysia and a high speed car chase in Vietnam over the past week have yielded over 1,000 pangolins destined to be consumed as a delicacy or crushed into ‘medicine’.
The endangered Sunda pangolin is the only species of scaly anteater found in Cambodia, but alarming declines in their numbers have conservationists, scientists, and wildlife managers questioning just how much longer this nation will have any to call her own.
TRAFFIC Southeast Asia is one of the world’s most important voices for pangolins. Based in Kuala Lumpur, this regional office of TRAFFIC monitors wildlife trade in Cambodia, Brunei, Timor Leste, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Viet Nam.
Life is hard for pangolins, as they face daily threats of being poached, losing habitat, or being brutally murdered by angry mobs of humans.
Media reports claim Thai authorities have thwarted an attempt to smuggle 50 pangolins into China via Lao People’s Democratic Republic (Lao PDR), a major transit route used by wildlife traffickers.
One of the biggest challenges in pangolin conservation is that we know very little about these secretive, elusive creatures.
Recent pangolin seizures suggest that Africa’s pangolins are increasingly being sourced for the traditional Chinese medicine trade.
Just after Customs officials confirmed that the China-Nepal border is serving as a significant smuggling route for the illegal wildlife trade, new media reports indicate a massive upswing in pangolin poaching in areas of Nepal near the porous Chinese border.
Three Zimbabwean men have been sentenced after they were found in illegal possession of a pangolin, which they apparently intended to use in superstitious rites to improve their mining business.