Will the pangolin become the next dodo?

Gazing at the dodo at the Pitt Rivers Museum, I never imagined fully grown up adults could ever repeat the same mistakes as those 300 years before.

When I was a kid, growing up just outside Oxford, I was lucky enough to be taken to the city’s famous Pitt Rivers Museum several times.

I hold the museum responsible for sparking off something in my brain thanks to its weird and wonderful ethnographic exhibits. So, as well as growing up believing our next-door neighbours, a family called the Meeks, would inherit the earth (according to morning prayers at primary school), I thought witches could be trapped in bottles, mole paws could help you fight evil and dogs living around the Bermuda Triangle wore glasses attached to gold chains. But that’s another story.

In the adjoining Oxford University Museum of Natural History is more strangeness; a skeleton of a dodo, the amazingly comical-looking giant bird from Mauritius which wouldn’t look out of place as a cartoon creation. Unfortunately, its friendly nature led to its extinction. Man couldn’t get enough of shooting them and today we are left with sketches and the Pitt Rivers’ dodo who was done for by a shot to the back of the head by some brave fellow. On another trip to the museum as a relatively new grown up, I remember staring at the dodo and naively thinking it would forever serve as a reminder that never again would we cause the extinction of another creature. Yet, many years later, it only serves to remind me of what complete idiots we humans are.

I wonder in a few years’ time whether a child will be staring at a pangolin skeleton alongside the dodo with every single giant wall at the museum decorated with the names of all the species we’ve managed to kill off over the last 50 years, mostly through forest clearance for growing food as well as climate change.  

The World Wildlife Fund’s Living Planet 2020 report revealed that population sizes declined by an average of 68 per cent from 1970 to 2016 when they looked at wildlife monitoring of more than 4,300 different vertebrate species - mammals, fish, birds and amphibians. The area worst hit is the Caribbean and Latin America where population sizes decreased by a 94 per cent.

However, I suspect if pangolins do go extinct, it’s likely there won’t be a single skeleton capable of surviving the brutal stripping of the creature in the name of medicine and luxury food. Its scales are used in traditional Chinese medicine for breast-feeding women who believe it can help them produce more milk for their babies. They’re also said to ‘reduce swelling’ though I’m guessing the poor pangolins didn’t receive any such medicine when they had theirs ripped off.

Pangolins have the unlucky title of most trafficked animal in the world, mostly for their scales for traditional medicine but also for their meat in both Africa and China and Vietnam. The scales – made of keratin, the same ingredients as our nails - can cost more than $3,000/kg on the black market and they are included in some health insurance plans in Vietnam and are used legally in China whose doctors continue to promote them as helping to increase breast milk, cure fertility and, I kid you not, anorexia in children.

And if having their scales and meat stripped wasn’t bad enough, their babies are used to make wine and their skins, presumably minus scales, are also trafficked perhaps as magic carpets or invisibility cloaks.

If I’m to use the same insane logic as those who ingest rhino horn and pangolin scales, then why as a rabid and long-term biter of nails (my own) have I never managed to cure various boils, infected cuts and eczema or produce gallons of breast milk?

No surprise in March last year medical journal Integrative Medicine Research published an article Evidence for the medicinal value of Squama Manitis (pangolin scale): A systematic review and came back with this conclusion.

‘There is no reliable evidence that Squama Manitis has special medicinal value. The removal of Squama Manitis from Pharmacopoeia is rational.’