“In one survey, 70% of Chinese respondents said they believed consuming pangolin could cure rheumatism and skin diseases, and heal wounds. People hold some of these beliefs thinking they are rooted in traditional Chinese cuisine and medicine. Except that our ancestors actually said otherwise.”
Today, on Friday the 13th, it’s worth noting that at last month’s 13th National People’s Congress in China, officials issued a decision titled, “Comprehensively Prohibiting the Illegal Trade of Wild Animals, Eliminating the Bad Habits of Wild Animal Consumption and Protecting the Health and Safety of the People.”
Not much wriggle room there, even allowing for something to get lost in translation. (Presumably, that was the short version). The culprit, of course — or prime motivating factor, depending on which way you look at it — was coronavirus. No one quite knows where it came from, or how it got into the general population, but one persistent theory is that, much like Ebola, Marburg and the hemorrhagic fevers in Africa, coronavirus started with bats and was somehow transmitted to humans through the consumption of wild animals reputed to have magical or mystical powers. As if pangolins, valued for the purported medicinal properties of their scales and already dubbed “the most trafficked animal in the world,” didn’t have enough on their plate as it is.
The date was Feb. 24th, and while coronavirus was nowhere near the global pandemic — or global panic, if you prefer — it is today, President Xi Jinping of China announced: “We can’t be indifferent anymore!”
The initial outbreak of coronavirus has been traced to an outdoor market in Wuhan, the capital city of the central Chinese province of Hubei, where seafood and wild delicacies are prized both for their unique taste and as a sign of affluence and social standing — the new ivory, if you will.
Pangolins, a shy, retiring and by all accounts good-natured and sweet-tempered mammal that resembles a scaly anteater but is actually an entirely different species, are particularly sought after, which is not helpful for an animal already near the top of the IUCN Red List of critically endangered species.
The feeling now in some circles is that the new ban will finally spare and protect some of China’s most vulnerable species.
But will it? As Wufei Yu, a respected, Chinese-born journalist and fellow of Outside Magazine noted in an op-ed piece earlier this month in the New York Times, China has had wildlife trading bans on its books for the better part of three decades — but that hasn’t stopped the pangolin from becoming the world’s most trafficked animal, nor did it prevent pangolins from becoming critically endangered in the first place.
As reassuring as the numbers in China are — in the year 2000, China issued detailed regulations governing some 1,700 protected species considered to be of biological, scientific and social importance — the numbers behind pangolin trafficking make it hard to see how the species can possibly survive, coronavirus or no coronavirus.
A year ago in January, more than nine tons of pangolin scales — roughly 14,000 animals — were seized in a single raid in Hong Kong. Weeks later, another 33 tons of pangolin meat were seized in Malaysia; the following month, in April, 2019, 14 tons of pangolin scales were seized in Singapore.
In just 20 years, the population of Malayan pangolins has dropped some 80%; Philippine and other South Asian pangolin populations have halved during that time.
As always, lax enforcement of already existing laws is a factor, as are the inevitable loopholes: exceptions for licensed retailers such as Chinese medicine shops, for example, and even online stores. The latest ban has a loophole that allows trade in wildlife for medicinal and research purposes, not unlike Japan’s refusal to heed an international edict whaling in the Southern Ocean and off Antarctica because they’re doing it for “research” purposes, and not to profit from the developed world’s voracious appetite for seafood.
The price of pangolin has increased from USD $7 per pound in the 1990s to some USD $300 today, in less than three decades. “Pangolin hot pot is considered a delicacy,” Wufei Yu wrote in the Times. “Officials have been known to try to impress high-level guests with a pangolin meat stir-fry and braise steam pangolin with ginger and citronella, and show off the results online. The meat is a status symbol.”
Much of the strange cultural belief in pangolins is rooted in traditional Chinese medicine — except, Yu noted, that “our ancestors actually said otherwise.”
“If anything, the meat of pangolins was believed to cause ailments, rather than cure any,” Yu wrote. “It tastes bitter and was thought to be poisonous. Beiji Qianjin Yaofang, a collection of prescriptions compiled by Sun Simiao, an alchemist of the Tang dynasty, advised in 652: ‘There are lurking ailments in our stomachs. Donʼt eat the meat of pangolins, because it may trigger them and harm us.’ Bencao Gangmu (Compendium of Materia Medica), the Chinese medicine and cuisine capstone by herbalist, naturalist and physician Li Shizhen (1518-93) warned that people who eat pangolin ‘may contract chronic diarrhea, and then go into convulsion and get a fever.’”
Well, yes, you might say that.
Of course, health authorities — and ordinary, everyday people — dealing with the effects of coronavirus today have little time to speculate how it got started, only how to end it. Or at least manage it.
In a perfect world it would be reassuring to imagine that one of the lessons to be learned from the present pandemic is to leave well enough alone, where nature is concerned — or, at least, don’t eat what you can’t trust.
Then again, as we know to our cost, we’re not living in a perfect world. Far from.
“Did pangolins transmit the coronavirus to humans?” Yu continued in the Times. “Is COVID19 their revenge on us for bringing them to the edge of extinction? (Either way), yet another ban on trading and eating pangolins isnʼt likely to help them, especially with its caveats for medical uses.
“Better instead to take on modern misconceptions about health and traditions. And for that, nothing beats going back to centuries-old texts.”
It is written.
