Pangolin trade highlights loopholes in rules to prevent spread of animal viruses

Covered in scales and about the size of a small dog, the reclusive mammal is a suspect in the coronavirus origin hunt

Pandemic has exposed magnitude of health threat from wildlife, and activists, scientists and legal experts are calling for change

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Pangolins are trafficked for their scales, which are used in traditional medicine in China and elsewhere. Photo: Shutterstock

Published: 5:01am, 24 May 2020Updated: 10:55pm, 24 May 2020

Vietnamese police pulled over the sedan on its way to Hanoi and seized 16 live pangolins. In Spain, two of the endangered mammals were found dead in a woman’s airport luggage from Equatorial Guinea. A shipping container in a Malaysian port held 6,000kg of pangolin scales labelled as cashew nuts.

That was just a few reported cases in the first three months of this year. The pangolin is an unlikely poster child in the fight against the illegal wildlife trade – about the size of a small dog on average, covered in scales, and mostly living on a diet of ants. It became the world’s most widely trafficked mammal because of its scales, used in traditional medicine in China and elsewhere.

Now, the reclusive pangolin is a suspect in the search for the origin of the virus that causes the Covid-19 disease after researchers found it carries a coronavirus with genetic similarities. The focus on the disease’s animal origins is also exposing some glaring loopholes in global rules governing the wildlife trade amid the threat to public health from zoonotic diseases, or those that jump from animals.

How the previously unknown virus causing Covid-19 got into humans remains a mystery, but most medical researchers agree it came from the wild, migrating from an animal before spreading around the world to kill more than 330,000 people in the space of five months.

Zoonotic threats

Well before the arrival of Covid-19, the World Health Organisation issued stark warnings about zoonotic threats, stating that since 1970 more than 1,500 new pathogens had been discovered and 70 per cent of them came from animals.

Yet, it is a jumbled patchwork of health codes, import controls, trade agreements and conservation frameworks that govern the international movement and health of wild animals. Regulations are typically enforced by underfunded agencies, and the global guidelines that concern animal trade and zoonotic disease focus on livestock, not wild animals, according to experts in the field. The leading body governing the global wild animal trade does not touch disease risk.