Pangolins and the tragedy of privatization

Dr. Mark Nicholson
4 hours ago
6 min read

by Dr. M. Nicholson

I have seen many mammals in Africa from aarvarks to zorillas but the ones that interest me the most are the ones I’ve never (or hardly ever) seen. Some of the ‘Big Five’ bore me, particularly cheetahs and lions. Cheetahs should not be on the list: they are small (around 50kg), are killed by big cats and are, apart from their speed, utterly defenceless and harmless. When surrounded, you can catch them by the tail and all they do is try and pull away from you. But they are great pets. Lions seem to spend most of their lives asleep. A wounded leopard is reputed to be highly dangerous to a hunter but when confronted by an irascible honey badger one-third of its size, the leopard retreats hurriedly and you won’t see it for dust. Elephants interest us all hugely of course, if only for their intelligence and social cohesion but they are extraordinarily destructive to the environment. The mammal not on the list and the one that one should fear the most, both on land and in water, is the hippo.

In December I was asked down to Kenya’s Maasai Mara National Reserve to assess forest destruction on the Olololo escarment to the north-west of the reserve. I stayed in the camp of an old friend and superb naturalist and wildlife photographer, who is CEO of the Mara Triangle, the most efficiently run part of the reserve which has a wilderness area where few tourists venture. In 2018, a Giant Pangolin was rediscovered in the forest, a species extirpated in Kenya since 1971. Now I have seen aye-ayes, bonobos, caracals, drills, geladas, nyalas, okapis, pukus and quaggas but I have never seen a pangolin in the wild. I’ve watched flying foxes, flying squirrels, Ethiopian wolves and marine dugongs but the pangolins have always evaded me. Many of these names come from tribal languages and have been adopted into English. When a more prosaic name is given in English such as the African Little Flying Squirrel (Anomalurus pusillus), it still rolls off the tongue more easily than say, the German word for it - Zwergdornschwanzhornchen. My job was to see whether it was feasible to reforest a block of private land leased to the Pangolin Project.

Oloololo escarpment beyond the snoozing leopard

Photo courtesy of Brian Heath

The Mara Reserve is not fenced. Fifty years ago wildlife would wander unimpeded over vast plains in all directions. In July every year over a million wildebeest cross the Tanzania border from the south, run the gauntlet of the Mara River and spend around three months grazing in Kenya. Elephant would beat a hasty retreat away from the melee and many would climb the escarpment and escape into the forests above the plains for some peace. Being pastoralists, the Maasai had no interest in the forest apart for dry season grazing. But human population growth has been so high that land hunger is now intense. Most of the land has been carved up and sold off in plots. Each owner then fenced his or her land (increasingly with electric fences powered by solar panels) and cut down the trees to make charcoal for sale. The Maasai have had to become smallholder agriculturalists growing maize. We used to talk about the “Tragedy of the Commons” where communal grazing meant overgrazing, which was seen as a threat to productive agriculture and livestock production. But today the tragedy in pastoralist areas is the privatization of land.

Hunting the pangolin and avoiding elephants on remnants of the Oloololo forest.

Elephants can no longer access their former haunts and they are terrified by electric fences[1], which make them nervous and dangerous. We had two armed guards on our walk and had continuously to be ready to beat a hasty retreat from skittish and irate pachyderms.

The Pangolin Project has leased 5000ha. from hundreds of private owners who have agreed to have their land reforested. The better the condition of the remaining forest, the higher the rent. Over $5m has already been paid in advance. The problem of course is that wildlife, particularly elephant and other herbivores, is incompatible with tree planting. So there will be hardly any wildlife allowed in the exclusion areas but it is hoped that the giant pangolins will have a safe area to allow for their survival. However, restoring tropical forest is a long and expensive business; so sadly and frankly, I think it is a long shot.

There are eight known species of pangolin, four in Asia and four in Africa (three in Kenya). The Giant Pangolin is mainly a west and central African species. It is indeed a relative giant weighing up to 35kg. The smallest African species, the White-bellied (Phataginus tricuspis) weighs between 2 and 3kg and the Cape Pangolin weighs 15-18kg.

All pangolins are interesting for three reasons. Firstly, they are decidedly odd. They have tiny faces, no teeth and elongated, extensile tongues. Their upper body is covered by tile-like keratinous scales. Their diet comprises uniquely ants and termites which they extract using extremely powerful claws. They are nocturnal, living in burrows by day and often share their accommodation with porcupines, aardvarks and snakes. When threatened, they roll themselves up into a ball of fairly impenetrable armour but apex predators (lions, leopards, hyaenas and crocodiles) will kill and eat them. The end of the tail is prehensile so they are good tree climbers.

Secondly, pangolins comprise around 20% of the world’s illegally traded animals. In Chinese and Vietnamese culture, the meat is a delicacy and their scales are supposedly medicinal. Though no one has any idea how many there are in the wild, the IUCN reckons that over a million were traded in the first decade of the century. The price is rising too from a few dollars thirty years ago to over $700 per kg today.

Third, I have never seen a living one in the wild. My initial interest in pangolins started with Covid in Dec 2019. A few years earlier I had been at a conference in Wuhan and was invited to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, one of the most respected microbiological research organizations in the world, where the virus was initially identified. The origin of the virus that caused COVID-19 in humans still remains a subject of intense investigation, with no universally accepted conclusion. The two main theories are a natural zoonotic spillover or a research-related incident. As so often in life, we may never get a definitive answer but the Evolutionary Genomics & Systems Group at the prestigious Centre for Computational & Theoretical Biology at the University of Würzburg supported the view that the Guangdong Pangolins were the intermediate hosts that adapted the SARS-CoV-2. They concluded in a paper in the International Journal of Molecular Science that pangolins represented a significant evolutionary link in the path of transmission of SARS-CoV-2 virus[2]. What is certain is that the virus itself originated in bats, the most successful group of mammals in the world, making up 20% of all mammal species and known to harbour a vast array of viruses. The same virus was then isolated in a pangolin in the ‘wet’ market in the city. From there, it obviously infected a human. Humans and other animals are often infected by viruses which do us no harm at all: we simply become known as ‘dead end’ hosts in which the virus effect in humans is asymptomatic and it is unable to replicate successfully. But somewhere along the line, the virus caused flu-like symptoms in a human, blood was taken to the Institute for further analysis and someone was insufficiently careful with the blood sample. I do not accept any of the ludicrous conspiracy theories surrounding the artificial ‘creation’ of the virus for nefarious purposes.

Oh for a pangolin in our house! Our stairs are nearly hollow and about a hundred of my books have been shredded or gobbled up by termites. They seem to outwit every insecticide known to humanity and they have cost me a fortune. Perhaps indeed they will outlive us all.

I never thought the execrable Lord Bothwell could resurface in consecutive OC articles but here he is again (or at least the remains of a biography of him).

I still have yet to see a pangolin, big or small, so I will leave the last word to Ogden Nash, who, had he heard of a pangolin, would have written an equally amusing ditty about one.

The Termite

Some primal termite knocked on wood

And tasted it and found it good!

And that is why your Cousin May

Fell through the parlor floor today