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On a cold, wet night in eastern Malaysia, conservation biologist Elisa Panjang trekked through a nature reserve in search of pangolins—the only scaled mammal in the world. If she had found one that evening in 2017, she would have fitted the animal with a tracking device and studied how it interacted with the nearby palm tree plantations encroaching on pangolin habitat.
Relatively little is known about the solitary and nocturnal creatures, also known as “scaly anteaters.” Their breeding and territorial behavior remains largely a mystery. In captivity they often die within the first few months due to stress and disease. Yet scientists do know that pangolins have served an essential ecological function for over 80 million years: They eat up to 200,000 ants and termites a day, providing natural pesticide to forests while aerating the soil and encouraging new growth. Their behavior has earned them the nickname “the guardians of the forest.”
But they are also the most heavily trafficked mammal in the world. Poachers seek them out for their scales then sell them for use in traditional Chinese medicines.
On that wet evening, Panjang spotted lights flashing across the tree line. “They are not supposed to be there,” she thought. Trespassing was a common problem in the reserve, which required research permits to enter.
The lights went out, then two men stepped into the forest clearing dressed in army camouflage and carrying what looked like guns, machetes and loaded duffle bags. Panjang had often interacted with scientists and rangers during her field work, and these men were clearly neither. She had seen poachers on camera traps before, and based on their equipment and suspicious demeanor, she suspected the pair to be just that.
She and her assistant put their headlights down, “because I didn’t want to see their face[s],” she says. Identifying them could make her and her assistant witnesses, which might have provoked the men to attack.
They exchanged basic greetings. She avoided asking them what they were doing and lied about her research. She didn’t even mention pangolins. As a wildlife warden, she wanted to gather information for authorities, but instead she casually bid farewell after noting the location: “Life is always the priority,” she says.
She and her assistant walked away. But her heart raced when the men followed on motorcycles through the dark forest until the researchers reached their docked boat.
Due to its proximity to wildlife markets in Vietnam and China and its population of native pangolins, Malaysia is both a source country and a trafficking route for the illicit pangolin trade. Eight species of pangolin are found across Africa and Asia. All are at least threatened, and three of the four species in Asia are critically endangered—largely due to poaching.
Experts who monitor wildlife trafficking believe poaching is significantly driven by the multibillion-dollar traditional Chinese medicine industry, which mass-produces pangolin-scale-derived pharmaceuticals to treat a variety of common ailments. Such scales are made of keratin, a common substance found in human fingernails and hair, and no scientific evidence demonstrates the effectiveness of these medicines.
Because pangolins are so elusive, conservationists have had a difficult time estimating how many are still left in the wild. WildAid estimates that at least 800,000 pangolins were poached globally in just the last five years—based on evidence pieced together through the seizure of trafficked scales and frozen corpses. But the true figure is expected to be much higher, as law enforcement intercepts only a fraction of the total cases, according to James Toone, deputy pangolin campaign lead at the Environmental Investigation Agency, which tracks wildlife trafficking.
Panjang remembers a time when pangolins were abundant in Malaysia. Her interest in them blossomed when she was a child after she found one sniffing near her house before disappearing into the forest. Pangolins, due to their unusual gait, appear like walking pinecones or tiny dinosaurs, traits that help endear them to the children Panjang educates as part of her conservation work.
Today, spotting wild pangolins in Malaysia and elsewhere is rare, but poachers use dogs to track them. When threatened, pangolins roll into protective balls—their thick scales protect them from traditional predators—but the posture makes it simple for poachers to pick them up. Because pangolin poaching leaves no corpse, unlike with larger species like elephants, tracking the crime becomes much more challenging.
With dwindling pangolin populations across Malaysia and the rest of Asia over the last decade, trafficking syndicates have turned their attention to Africa.
A new source of pangolins
One trafficking hot spot for the creatures is Cameroon, where three species of pangolin have survived for millennia. For centuries, Cameroonians, like many other peoples across Asia and Africa, have eaten pangolin as a delicacy.
“It wasn’t anything serious,” says Eric Kaba Tah, the deputy director of the Last Great Ape Organization, a Yaoundé-based nonprofit that combats wildlife trafficking. “For many years, Cameroonians would eat the pangolin, scrape off the scales, pull off the scales and throw them into their backyards.”
Then trafficking syndicates, who according to Tah often originate from Nigeria and China, started offering Cameroonians the opportunity to dramatically increase their income from a single pangolin by selling both the scales and meat. The exchange was a compelling opportunity for some residents of Cameroon, especially in the rural areas where families often survive on hundreds of dollars a month. Although syndicates often recruit poachers from low-income rural communities, these poachers receive the smallest portion of the profit cut while being exposed to the most risk of being caught, according to Tah.
Tah’s team members, who infiltrate trafficking syndicates, had been focusing on ivory and leopard skin when they first heard about rising demand for pangolin scales. The trend surprised them, as pangolins were not thought to be of major interest to traffickers. Their first case was in 2013, when a Chinese national attempted to smuggle pangolin scales through a small port town in the southwest of Cameroon.
“That’s when we started looking deeper into it and found that something was going on,” Tah says. In 2017, Tah’s team helped catch two Chinese nationals smuggling five tons of pangolin scales.
Since then, the Cameroonian government has banned the capture or killing of pangolins, launched communications campaigns to end illegal consumption of meat, and in 2024 increased the sentencing for poachers and traffickers to 15 to 20 years in prison.
Altogether these measures have seemingly reduced trafficking. The Environmental Investigation Agency’s global crime tracker indicates that pangolin scale trafficking incidents in Cameroon peaked in 2019 with 12 seizures (totaling over 3.3 tons), but incidents have since fallen. There have been just two cases in 2024, combining for 437 pounds of seized scales. According to Tah, the last major pangolin case was in 2022, when more than 660 pounds of pangolin scales were seized in a single operation.
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But Tah isn’t convinced that the threat has been erased. Although he believes that the opportunistic poachers coming from low-income communities have been scared off by improved law enforcement, he suspects that the gap has been filled by professional traffickers.
“Those who are left now are purely the professionals who understand the game very well, who understand how to carry out the concealment, how to bribe the officials,” he says. “It’s still continuing at the same rate, but it’s becoming harder to find.”
He says scales are now trafficked in smaller, more easily concealable quantities, which can be disguised as oyster shells within food crates, or even hidden under the carpets of cars. In one case, Cameroonian authorities found pangolin scales encased in lead—to disrupt scanners—and tucked into the panels of faulty machines being shipped back to China.
Often, scales are moved to Nigeria, where there are comparatively lax laws and enforcement. (More than ten tons were seized in Lagos in a single operation in 2020.) From there, they go to China or Vietnam, the two biggest global markets for illicit wildlife consumption, often via Malaysia.
Though no “smoking gun” explicitly connects the traditional Chinese medicine industry to the illegal trafficking, according to wildlife trafficking experts who monitor the situation, there is little doubt from where the demand stems.
The market driving demand
When trafficked, caged pangolins held in a wet market in Wuhan, China, were initially thought to be the cause of the Covid-19 pandemic, some conservationists saw a silver lining: Perhaps the existential threat of zoonotic disease would spur China to crack down on the illicit wildlife market. Maybe Covid-19 would save the pangolin.
Initially this seemed to be the case. Following the outbreak, China removed pangolin scales as an “individual herb” from the list of approved ingredients for traditional Chinese medicine, improved pangolins’ legal protections and banned the consumption of their meat. China is also party to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES), which has outlawed international trade of pangolins since 2016 and called for the closure of domestic markets and the reporting of stockpiles of scales in 2022.
Yet despite these developments, Chinese pharmaceutical companies continue to mass-produce pangolin scale medicines and sell them, legally, directly to consumers online.
The problem stems from major outstanding domestic policy loopholes. Under Chinese law, pharmaceutical companies are allowed to use pangolin scales in medicines if they come from domestic sources or if the scales come from stockpiles collected before international trade bans in 2016. Despite its obligations under CITES, China hasn’t fully closed its domestic market for medicinal purposes, nor has it reported on stockpile figures.
As a result, there hasn’t been an “appreciable shift” in the trafficking of pangolins, explained Toone. “There continues to be an appetite for pangolin, and that appetite is largely driven by demand from China,” he says—referencing unpublished intelligence gathered by the organization’s field agents in 2024.
Although Chinese pharmaceutical companies are allowed to use domestically sourced pangolins for medicinal purposes, the Chinese pangolin was considered functionally extinct as recently as 2019. Meanwhile, stockpiles of internationally sourced pangolin scales should have been cut off from replenishment since 2016. Yet, nearly ten years on, Toone explains, pharmaceutical companies continue to mass-produce pangolin scale medicines and claim they come from historic stockpiles.
“They should have run out by now,” says Toone. Limited supply should have driven the price for medicines up. But that hasn’t been the case, leading to suspicion that stockpiles continue to be replenished illegally.
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And while international headlines in 2020 suggested that China had removed pangolin scales from the list of official ingredients approved for traditional Chinese medicine, this is only partially true. Pangolin scales were removed from the “individual herbs” category of the pharmacopeia handbook, but they remain referenced throughout the “formulas” sections. “Individual herbs” are single ingredients that are rarely used by practitioners when prescribing treatments. “Formulas,” on the other hand, include combinations of various individual ingredients and are more often referenced by practitioners when prescribing treatments.
As a result, Toone explains, these policy loopholes, along with pangolin scales’ continued inclusion within the traditional Chinese medicine pharmacopeia, have allowed illegally sourced pangolin scales to enter the legal traditional Chinese medicine market and satisfy the ongoing demand.
Yet, for many leaders within the traditional Chinese medicine community, the pharmaceutical companies that profit from the use of endangered wildlife are rogue actors tarnishing the name of the ancient practice and its potential global appeal.
A splintered industry
Lixing Lao, a traditional Chinese medicine practitioner and the president of the Virginia University of Integrative Medicine, has been advocating for the protection of wildlife in the traditional Chinese medicine practice since 1998, when he gave testimony to U.S. Congress on the need to improve legal protections for rhinoceroses and tigers.
However, it was in the 2010s, while serving as the director of the University of Hong Kong’s School of Chinese Medicine, that he was first alerted to the plight of pangolins.
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The idea that traditional Chinese medicine could be ravaging the environment was antithetical to his belief that the practice should work in harmony with nature. That inspired him and his like-minded colleagues to found the Coalition for Wildlife Protection in Traditional Chinese Medicine.
The coalition, launched formally in April 2024, includes a wide network of practitioners, educators, researchers and manufacturers who have pledged not to buy, sell or use endangered wildlife. Instead, the coalition highlights that herbal remedies are just as effective and more fundamental to the history and roots of the practice than treatments including endangered wildlife parts. Out of thousands of ingredients, “maybe around ten” are endangered species, Lao emphasizes. Herbal alternatives to pangolin scale medicines exist and provide similar functions, he says.
But herbal remedies are also a matter of practicality: “If all the wildlife is endangered or extinct, then that means Chinese medicine is also gone,” he says.
He also worries that the pharmaceutical companies producing pangolin scale medicines are doing irreparable damage to the name of traditional Chinese medicine, potentially turning away future generations from the practice. “We don’t want our reputation ruined by these activities,” he explains.
Although the coalition has gained global traction among practitioners who prescribe medicines, the pharmaceutical companies that produce pangolin scale medicines have ignored their calls.
Lao believes that these pharmaceutical companies, which are multimillion-dollar corporations with Wall Street funding, lie about the benefits of animal parts for profit.
“They emphasize the [medicinal] benefit of the endangered species so they can sell at a better price. … They use the TCM [traditional Chinese medicine] name to sell these products,” says Lao. “This has nothing to do with us. We don’t think this is healthy.”
Three pharmaceutical companies that use pangolin parts in their products did not respond to requests for comment on this article.
Yet, these companies inevitably harm the global reputation of the industry and its investors, which may damage the Chinese government’s plans to promote traditional Chinese medicine globally as a core component of its Belt and Road Initiative. Announced in 2013 by President Xi Jinping as a “New Silk Road,” the Belt and Road Initiative is an approximately one-trillion-dollar plan to interlink economies and cultures around the world, largely driven through infrastructure development, and is seen by many as a means of spreading China’s influence globally.
Some conservationists fear that the Belt and Road Initiative could exacerbate wildlife trafficking by expediting trade between countries with scarce regulations. But Lao believes it is in the interest of the Chinese government to protect wildlife. “We want to promote Chinese medicine globally,” he says. “You must have a positive image of Chinese medicine in order to reach consumers.”
The National Medical Products Administration of China recently announced efforts to develop alternatives for endangered species used in traditional Chinese medicine, including pangolin scales. Lao speculates that a synthetic alternative to pangolin scales with the same chemical structure would likely provide a more seamless transition for the pharmaceutical companies than selling different herbal alternatives. Although many conservationists see this as a positive prospect, with pangolin populations collapsing, the issue needs rapid attention.
“The problem is how long it will take,” Lao says. “Let’s act now, because they’re dying every day. We cannot wait.”
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