Fighting to Save the World’s Most Wanted Animal

It was 4 p.m. in the forests of central Cameroon, which meant it was time to wake the pangolins. The first resident roused from slumber occupied a wooden crate positioned against the wall inside an airy clinic. The animal that emerged was as unusual as it was enchanting: around three feet long, with a low-slung body, a narrow tapering head, powerful forelimbs tipped with curved claws, a prodigious tail.

A pregnant white-bellied pangolin, one of the eight recognized species, she was accustomed to this routine by now, having arrived at the Tikki Hywood Foundation’s pangolin rescue center a week earlier. She’d been rescued from a market in the nearby town of Mbalmayo; her bruised tail suggested that she’d been caught in a snare. Too vulnerable to go outside to forage for the ants and termites that constitute her natural diet, she was being sustained with maize meal mixed with supplements, and a sprinkling of soil, which helped trigger her instinct to feed and aided her digestion.

The center’s Zimbabwean founder, Lisa Hywood, held out the bowl of porridge as the animal went to work with her noodle-like tongue. To establish trust, Hywood conjured a rhythmic snorting sound from deep in her chest, mimicking the pangolin’s “chuffing” vocalizations. “It’s like they can read your energy,” she told me. “You have to succumb to them before they succumb to you.”

Not that the ravenous creature needed much encouragement. An ultrasound later revealed that she was carrying twins. Each pangolin at the center is cataloged by the order in which it arrives in a calendar year. Midway through April, this was number 27, though Hywood referred to her simply as “mum.” Even in this sterile setting, 27 was hunched and vigilant, her whole being canted toward the obsessive pursuit of food. Pangolins’ eyes, black and glassy like onyx beads, provide limited vision. But what they lack in eyesight they compensate for with sensitive, hemispheric ears and an acute sense of smell. In the wild, 27 would be capable of detecting her quarry through several inches of wood, breaking into tree bark or decaying logs with her claws, then using that extraordinary tongue, now hoovering up porridge more quickly than the human eye could track, to gorge.

But the most distinguishing aspect of the pangolin’s physiology is the scales. A pangolin is often described as a “scaly anteater,” its top side covered in overlapping keratin plates from nose to tail, yet it belongs in an entirely distinct superorder within animal taxonomy. When threatened by another animal, pangolins generally don’t fight back or flee. Instead, they roll into a tight ball, folding their head, legs, and underbelly beneath their tails. In Africa, where the creatures are found in at least 34 countries, this response typically thwarts even the most formidable predators. Lions have been observed batting around a pangolin like a soccer ball in frustration, unable to penetrate the scales with their teeth.

It’s a bitter irony that the pangolin’s defense mechanism has become one of the principal sources of its vulnerability. As in many other places on the continent, pangolins in Cameroon have long been hunted for their meat. But in recent years they’ve faced another threat, as criminal gangs across sub-Saharan Africa incentivize locals to supply them with scales. While some pangolins, like 27, are ensnared, others are simply found balled up on the forest floor. It makes them easy prey for human hunters. Today the pangolin ranks among the most heavily trafficked wild mammals in the world. Although the full extent of the illicit trade remains unknown, studies suggest the number of African pangolins harvested in recent decades runs into the millions.

The international black market is driven largely by demand in East Asia, where pangolins are considered a culinary delicacy and are coveted because their scales are a key ingredient in many powders associated with traditional Chinese medicine. When processed, the scales are marketed as pao shan jia, an ingredient used in prescriptions to aid breastfeeding and treat a range of maladies, including liver disease, infertility, arthritis, and various tumors. Studies indicating the product harbors no scientifically proven benefits have done little to temper demand.

More than a decade ago, as poaching began to decimate pangolin populations in Asia, traffickers increasingly turned to Africa. By 2016, after years of lobbying by government agencies and conservation groups, countries worldwide agreed to impose a global ban on the commercial trade of all eight pangolin species. But traffickers have continued to thrive in regions where enforcement has been under-resourced or slow to act.

During the pandemic, when pangolins were mistakenly considered a possible vector for the transmission of COVID-19 to humans, the publicity highlighted the animals’ continuing exploitation. “Pangolins [have gone] from a weird little species that most people had never heard of to a global conservation priority,” said Matt Shirley, co-chair of the Pangolin Specialist Group at the International Union for Conservation of Nature Species Survival Commission and a Rolex National Geographic Perpetual Planet Explorer. As the number of live pangolins confiscated from traffickers has increased, one critical intervention involves learning how to rehabilitate them in captivity—and that’s a puzzle that has bewildered scientists for decades.

Located not far from the capital city of Yaoundé, the Tikki Hywood Foundation’s Cameroon rescue center comprises a collection of concrete bungalows beside a clay road, where the hum of insects is punctuated by intermittent bursts of pandemonium from another wildlife refuge next door. Established in 2019, the Cameroon outpost is the second location for the nonprofit foundation, which is based in Zimbabwe. In April, the center’s longest-term resident was also its smallest. Baby Arsène was a beautiful specimen with pale, delicately striated scales. His rescuer and namesake, Arsène Onguéné, had been working in the village of Biakoa when he came across the day-old pup. The villagers had eaten the mother, Onguéné told me. Children were using the baby as a toy.

As tiny as a hamster when Onguéné brought him to the center four months earlier, Baby Arsène had since tripled in size, hand-fed with syringes of milk supplemented with vitamins, minerals, and amino acids. “In many ways, it’s a simple animal,” said Julie Vanassche, a Belgian veterinary nurse turned conservationist who oversees the Cameroon center. “It eats until it’s full, then sleeps. It’s just eat, sleep, repeat.”

Despite the animals’ predictable routines, caring for pangolins remains a relentlessly labor-intensive endeavor. Though their typical intake of tens of thousands of ants or termites a day might not suggest a discriminating appetite, they are notoriously fussy eaters. “One day they will eat one species of ant. Present the same species the next day, they’ll refuse,” Vanassche said.

Catering to these idiosyncrasies requires a complicated daily choreography. As Hywood and Vanassche tended to 27 and Baby Arsène, pangolins that were strong enough to go outside were each entrusted to a minder, who then ventured into the surrounding forest, setting the animals down close to rotting logs and undergrowth—anywhere that might host ants and termites, which, in this hyperabundant forest, means everywhere.

One afternoon, a car pulled up containing three more white-bellieds, rescued the previous day from a town market northeast of the capital. Chaperoning them was Orock Ayuketah, Cameroon’s chief of service for reserves, sanctuaries, and zoological gardens in the Ministry of Forestry and Wildlife. Pangolin meat continues to be a common sight in Cameroonian marketplaces, he told me. He suspected that this was the fate that had awaited this trio before he received a tip-off from his network of paid informants. A team of eco-guards was deployed within a few hours, alongside four gendarmes. “If we don’t go with the military, things could go very bad, very fast,” said Ayuketah. Recently, in the village of Djouyaya, two of Ayuketah’s eco-guards were attacked with large stones. One of them, Nasoudi Andreas, later died from infected injuries. Pangolin meat sellers have been operating for a long time, said Ayuketah, and challenging the tradition is often met with “furious” resistance.

Lisa Hywood started out as an unlikely protagonist in this battle to save one of Africa’s most enigmatic creatures. In 1992, she’d been working for an apparel company in Paris when the unexpected death of her father, Tikki, brought her back to her native Zimbabwe. Inspired by her dad’s love of nature, Hywood shifted careers, initially working with elephants, then cobbling together enough funds to launch her first wildlife sanctuary. As time went on, she became motivated by a desire to “support the underdogs,” animals that might not have the stature of elephants or rhinos but were no less endangered. For the logo, she chose a pangolin balled into a circle. Revered in Zimbabwe as a royal animal, it seemed a fitting symbol for her father, “my chief.”

Seven months later, national park authorities rang her about a pangolin. “I think they thought, She’s got a logo with a pangolin, she must know what she’s doing,” Hywood recalled. But the reality was she’d never even seen a pangolin, let alone cared for one. Elusive and often solitary, the animals at the time were something of a scientific enigma.

After a nearly 200-mile drive to Zimbabwe’s lowveld savanna, Hywood was handed a tethered sack. Inside was a female Temminck’s ground pangolin, Africa’s most widely distributed pangolin species. The animal’s rattling chest suggested pneumonia. “I reached down and picked her out, and she just had one eye that looked at me, and that was it,” Hywood said. She named her Negomo. They were inseparable for the next two and a half years. Hywood’s only insight into rehabilitating the animal came from a South African zoo professional who had some fleeting experience with caring for pangolins, little of it positive. And so she improvised. In many ways, Hywood told me, Negomo “taught the world what pangolins need.”

Hywood, now 56, would prove to be a tireless champion for all manner of African wildlife. This spring, her Zimbabwe headquarters was home to a shifting cast of bush babies, duikers, and spotted hyenas. But it’s the pangolin that has become the organization’s specialty. At first, they came in a trickle. Hywood took in nine pangolins between 1994 and 2007, then none at all until 2011. The uptick began in 2014. While word spread that the foundation had unlocked the intricacies of pangolin rehabilitation, the wider region was increasingly being drawn into the global trade in scales. Long before the world took notice, “we already knew it was a silent war,” Hywood said. By 2016, the number of pangolins arriving at the Zimbabwe sanctuary had increased from six a year to an average of two every week.

Past efforts to keep pangolins in captivity often foundered. Removed from their natural habitat, the animals would frequently curl up and refuse to eat. Bringing them food wouldn’t cut it. “As soon as you touch an ant or termite mound, [the insects] start expelling formic acid. By the time you get [them] to the pangolin, it’s too strong, and the defense mechanism from the ants and termites has already kicked in,” Hywood said.

She discovered that the only way to feed a pangolin reliably is to facilitate natural foraging—walking aids the process of digestion. And so, over decades, Hywood’s team honed its methodology, employing groups of minders to walk the creatures day or night, assessing their welfare by keeping a meticulous record of body weight fluctuations. Subtle factors, notably the presence of new people, can cause the animal’s weight to drop by nearly four ounces a day, a significant reduction for a creature that might weigh only 18 pounds.

In recent years, Hywood has received requests for help from conservationists struggling to sustain rescued pangolins from Sierra Leone to the Philippines. One of her petitioners was Vanassche, who was working at a wildlife sanctuary in Liberia in 2017 when a missionary brought in a pangolin pup. “Lisa told me, You need to walk this pangolin. I was like: What, with a leash?” Vanassche recalled. From there, she emulated her mentor’s journey, as pangolins became a preoccupation and then a calling.

Another of Hywood’s more regular correspondents is British conservationist Claire Okell, who heads the Pangolin Project in Kenya. In 2021, her team had been researching Temminck’s pangolins in the forests of the Masai Mara National Reserve when they came across a video of a conspicuously large pangolin just beyond the reserve’s western boundary. Temminck’s pangolins shuffle along on their hind legs. But this animal appeared to be quadrupedal, with longer forelimbs. Okell immediately realized she was looking at a giant ground pangolin—the first sighting of the species in Kenya to be officially documented by conservationists since 1971. For two years before the discovery of the video, her organization’s members had been working in the Sand River area, about 30 miles away. “No one realized that this particularly rare species of pangolin was literally over the hill,” she said.

Within a year, the project pivoted to focus exclusively on a population of up to 25 giant pangolins that live in and around the Nyekweri forest, a biodiverse but unprotected ecosystem beset on all sides by encroaching agriculture. Working with local landowners, Okell’s team has de-electrified 81 miles of fencing that pose a grave risk to pangolins when they become entangled. By tagging individuals, they’re able to dispatch a “pangolin protection unit” to intervene when an animal is observed approaching one of the remaining live fences. But Okell and her team are painfully aware that all this legwork will be for nothing if the creatures’ remaining habitat is destroyed. Arguably, their most consequential scheme is a lease agreement program that requires participating landowners to set aside space that can be preserved and restored for pangolins in exchange for monthly payments. So far, they have secured almost 16,000 acres.

To monitor this precious population, the project maintains around a hundred camera traps, all trained on burrows. “It’s a really new field,” said Okell, who sometimes cross-references observations with Hywood’s wealth of knowledge about Temminck’s pangolins to determine the giant pangolins’ distinct peculiarities. The team has learned that the giants are phenomenal diggers, that they are surprisingly proficient swimmers resilient enough to swim through floods, that females will fight ferociously over territory, and that pups stay with their mothers for an extended period. But much about their social and breeding habits and baseline dietary needs remains a mystery.

While conservationists work on novel strategies to protect pangolins in their habitats, the ongoing trafficking threat has demanded a revolution of its own. In the wake of COVID-19, customs officials in Nigeria—the hub of illicit pangolin export in Africa—have been more aggressively targeting kingpins working the black market. Between 2021 and 2025, the Nigeria Customs Service, acting on intelligence from the international Wildlife Justice Commission, seized more than 28 tons of pangolin scales taken from up to 135,000 animals and arrested several high-level targets. “What we’ve demonstrated is that this trade is not inevitable—it can be disrupted,” said Olivia Swaak-Goldman, executive director of the commission. This kind of collaboration has helped enforcement agencies better understand how these networks operate. “Trafficking routes have collapsed, market dynamics have shifted, and the risks for traffickers have fundamentally changed,” Swaak-Goldman said.

As with all illegal trade, however, the diffuse and clandestine nature of the supply chain means that the long-term impact of such busts is hard to quantify, cautioned Matt Shirley. “The market still exists, despite the inroads,” he said. Just this year, in the Cameroonian seaside town of Idenau, a special defense unit intercepted around 110 pounds of scales and other contraband, including gorilla skulls and elephant ivory. Reducing demand, Shirley told me, will require a “generational shift”: enabling and empowering sellers and consumers at both ends of the supply chain to abandon long-held practices.

In the meantime, Hywood is pursuing innovative ways of “opening our eyes to the secret world of a pangolin.” In Zimbabwe, the Tikki Hywood Foundation has been tracking released pangolins for years, and a few of them now sport wireless accelerometers—unobtrusive devices that measure their movements in three-dimensional planes.

Accelerometers offer a key advantage. Previously, tagging methods that might have captured the starting and ending points of a pangolin’s journey gave no indication of what the animal was doing en route, Hywood said. Parsing the new accelerometer data, scientists have refined an algorithm that indicates when a pangolin is walking, foraging, digging, and at rest—insights that are helping biologists synchronize care with these creatures’ natural biorhythms. But while much of the methodology is empirical, the work of gaining a pangolin’s trust—what Hywood calls “the hookup”—remains a matter of intuition.

During my visit, Hywood had formed a particular bond with number 24. Found on a government patrol of a national park, he had come in a few weeks earlier with a deep machete wound to the head. One evening, after 24 had had a tentative walk, Hywood cradled him in a ball, issuing her practiced chuffs as Vanassche flushed out his wound with iodine and a cotton swab. After each intrusion, Hywood relaxed her grip, permitting 24 to look up and around, as if seeking reassurance, before tucking his snout back under his tail for further ministrations. “If they come here, chances are their only previous interaction with humans will have been negative,” Vanassche said. “Yet here is this wild animal trusting us implicitly. It just shows how intelligent they are.”

By the end of the week, four pangolins were deemed to have recovered sufficiently to be released. After a three-hour drive and a sluggish boat journey downriver, deep in a forest that shall remain unnamed, they were returned to the wild. The last to go was 24. He came out of his pet carrier in a tight ball, before unfurling in Vanassche’s hands, sniffing the air. Adding together all the triage, tube feeds, medical procedures, and minder sessions, Vanassche reckoned that, over 19 days at the center, he had received around a hundred hours of care. “He’s desperate to climb,” she said, as 24 reached out for the aerial root of a wild fig tree and started to ascend. “He hasn’t been high for almost a month.” Ten feet up, he glanced back over his shoulder, a final acknowledgment, then continued clambering, disappearing into the forest canopy.