Pangolins receive surprising lifeline with new protections in China
The highly trafficked mammal has been hunted for years and is now stigmatized for unproven Covid-19 connections.
China has granted a reprieve to the world’s most trafficked nonhuman mammal—the pangolin. The country’s 2020 list of approved traditional medicines does not include pangolin scales, as it has for decades. The scales have long been sold in traditional pharmacies in China as an ingredient in legally allowed medications to treat everything from lactation problems to arthritis.
Medicinal use of the scales has pushed the world’s pangolin species—four in
Asia and four in Africa—toward extinction. Tens of thousands of the animals, which resemble scaly anteaters, are killed annually for their meat—considered a luxury food in China and Vietnam—as well as their scales, curved disks of keratin, the same substance that's in human fingernails.
“This is the single greatest measure that could
