Somewhere in the dry savannas of sub-Saharan Africa, or in the dense forests of Southeast Asia, an animal is moving through the darkness that most people alive today will never see in the wild. It walks slowly, deliberately, on the outer edges of its hind feet and the knuckles of its front ones, its long tail sweeping behind it, its small eyes scanning the ground. When it finds what it is looking for — an ant mound, a termite colony — it tears it open with claws powerful enough to rip through concrete, inserts a tongue longer than its own body, and feeds.

If threatened, it does one thing: it rolls into a ball. Its overlapping scales — made of keratin, the same protein as human fingernails — lock together into an armour so effective that lions have been observed batting a curled pangolin across the ground in frustration, unable to find a way in. Leopards give up. Hyenas walk away. The pangolin has been using this defence for 80 million years, and against every predator it evolved alongside, it works perfectly.

Against humans, it is a death sentence.

The Animal Nobody Knows

The pangolin is one of the least known large mammals on earth, which is remarkable given that there are eight species of it, distributed across Africa and Asia, and that it is — by volume of illegal trade — the most trafficked wild mammal on the planet. More pangolins are seized by customs officials each year than any other illegally traded animal. The numbers that are seized represent, by most estimates, a fraction of the total trade. Tens of thousands of animals are taken from the wild every year. Possibly hundreds of thousands.

And yet, ask most people to name an endangered animal and they will say tiger, elephant, rhino. The pangolin, which faces a more acute existential crisis than any of these, remains largely invisible.

Part of this is appearance. The pangolin does not look like what most people expect a mammal to look like. Its body is covered in scales — not skin, not fur, but overlapping plates of keratin arranged like the leaves of an artichoke or the scales of a pine cone. It has no teeth. Its ears are small and its eyes are smaller. It moves with a slow, deliberate gait that suggests something ancient and unhurried. It is, in the most literal sense, unlike anything else.

It is also, taxonomically, genuinely unusual. Pangolins belong to the order Pholidota — a group with no close living relatives. Their nearest evolutionary cousins are the carnivores: dogs, cats, bears, seals. They are more closely related to a domestic cat than to any reptile, despite appearances that suggest otherwise. Their scales evolved independently of fish scales and reptile scales — a case of convergent evolution producing a similar solution to the problem of protection in a completely different lineage.

A Tongue Longer Than Its Body

The pangolin is a specialist, and its specialisation is total. It eats ants and termites, almost exclusively, and every part of its anatomy reflects this singular focus.

Its claws are extraordinary — long, curved, and immensely powerful, capable of tearing open the hardened mounds of African termites that can resist a pickaxe. Its sense of smell is acute enough to locate insect colonies underground. It has no teeth whatsoever; instead, it swallows small stones that sit in its muscular stomach and grind the insects it consumes, in the same way birds use grit.

And then there is the tongue. A pangolin’s tongue is not stored in its mouth — there is not enough room. It originates deep in the chest cavity, anchored near the sternum, and extends to a length that exceeds the animal’s own body in some species. It is coated in a thick, sticky saliva that insects adhere to on contact. A pangolin feeding at a termite mound can consume tens of thousands of insects in a single night, its tongue flickering in and out up to 150 times per minute.

A single pangolin eats an estimated 70 million insects per year. In doing so, it regulates insect populations across its territory, aerates soil through its digging, and plays a role in the ecosystem that is only beginning to be formally quantified. Where pangolins disappear, termite populations expand. Soil structure changes. The effects ripple outward in ways that are difficult to predict and harder to reverse.

The Scale of the Crisis

The pangolin is trafficked for two things: its scales and its meat.

In parts of China and Vietnam, pangolin scales are used in traditional medicine — ground into powder and prescribed for conditions ranging from skin disorders to lactation problems to cancer. There is no scientific evidence that pangolin scales have any medicinal effect. They are made of keratin. Chewing a human fingernail would be pharmacologically equivalent. But the demand is real, the belief is deeply embedded, and the market it sustains is worth billions of dollars annually.

Pangolin meat is also consumed as a luxury food in parts of Asia, served in high-end restaurants as a status symbol. The price per kilogram has risen as the animals have become rarer — a perverse dynamic in which scarcity drives up value, which drives up poaching, which drives up scarcity further.

All eight species of pangolin are now listed on Appendix I of CITES — the highest level of international trade protection, prohibiting commercial trade entirely. In 2020, China removed pangolin scales from its official list of approved traditional medicine ingredients, a significant symbolic step. But enforcement remains inconsistent, corruption within supply chains is widespread, and the trade continues.

Between 2000 and 2019, an estimated one million pangolins were taken from the wild. The true figure is almost certainly higher.

The Mothers and the Young

Pangolins are slow reproducers, which makes the pressure of poaching particularly devastating. Most species give birth to a single pup per year. The pup is born with soft scales that harden within days, and it rides on its mother’s tail for the first three months of its life, curling beneath her when she rolls into a defensive ball. The bond between mother and pup is strong — females have been documented refusing to abandon their young even when captured, curling around them protectively until both are taken.

This image — a mother pangolin curled around her pup in a market, or in a shipping container, or in a poacher’s sack — has become one of the defining images of the wildlife trafficking crisis. It is not a comfortable image. It is not supposed to be.

What It Would Take

Saving the pangolin requires things that are genuinely difficult: sustained enforcement across multiple countries with different legal systems and different levels of institutional capacity; a shift in consumer behaviour driven by education and cultural change; international cooperation on a scale that wildlife conservation rarely achieves; and enough time for populations that have been severely depleted to recover.

None of these things are impossible. Attitudes toward ivory have shifted dramatically in a generation. Demand for tiger products has declined in some markets. Change is possible. But it requires the pangolin to become, first, a name that people know — an animal that exists in the public imagination with the same clarity as the elephant or the whale.

That is, in the end, the simplest thing anyone can do. Learn what a pangolin is. Tell someone else. Make it harder for the world to lose something this strange and this irreplaceable without noticing.

Did you know about the pangolin before reading this — and what do you think would make the biggest difference in protecting it? Share your thoughts in the comments below!