China has laws to stop pangolin trafficking – but what happens to the seized animals?
- A black market persists for the endangered species, with the price of scales soaring
- Information about recovered pangolins proving difficult to obtain from the authorities and officials may be ill-equipped to rehabilitate those found alive
When Chinese police found them in the boot of a smuggler’s car, 33 of the trafficked pangolins – endangered scaly mammals from southern China – were still alive, wrapped in plastic bags soaked with their own urine.
But the fate of the creatures – whose scales are worth nearly their weight in silver on the black market – was not a happy one. Every last pangolin died in government captivity within a few months of the August 2017 seizure.
A pioneering environmental non-profit organisation in Beijing has launched an investigation, called Counting Pangolins, to find out what happens to such animals recovered from the illegal wildlife trade. Its findings so far highlight discrepancies between environmental laws and outcomes.
China is hardly unique. The number of environmental laws on the books worldwide has increased 38-fold since 1972, according to an exhaustive UN environment report released on Thursday. But the political will and capacity to enforce those laws often lags, undermining global efforts to curb issues like wildlife trafficking, air pollution and climate change, the report found.
“The law does not self-execute,” said Carl Bruch, a study co-author and director of international programmes at the Environmental Law Institute in Washington.
Each of the 33 pangolins transferred to the care of a government-run wildlife rescue centre in China’s Guangxi province died within three months, according to records obtained by the non-profit China Biodiversity Conservation and Green Development Foundation and shown to Associated Press.