Petition: A Million Pangolins Were Trafficked in a Decade. South Africa Is Fighting It Nearly Alone.

More than a million pangolins have been taken from the wild in the past decade. They are the most trafficked mammal on earth, hunted for scales made of keratin, the same material as your fingernails, sold into traditional medicine markets on the basis of health benefits that have never been demonstrated. Eight pangolin species are now threatened with extinction and four are critically endangered. South Africa sits in the middle of this, holding both extraordinary biodiversity and the enforcement units, rangers and rehabilitation centres trying to stop the trade one seizure at a time. Please sign the petition calling on international funders to increase Support for wildlife protection in the region.

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The argument here is about who pays, and it is a fair one. Biodiversity is routinely described as a global inheritance, and the countries that hold most of it are rarely the countries with the largest Conservation budgets. South Africa’s police units, Conservation officers and rescue centres work case by case, seizure by seizure, against trafficking networks that operate internationally and are funded by demand generated somewhere else entirely. Asking the countries where that demand originates, and the institutions that describe this wildlife as a shared global asset, to fund its protection is not charity. It is proportionality.

It is also worth being clear-eyed about what this does and does not fix. Money buys rangers, vehicles, forensic capacity and rehabilitation space, and those things matter enormously to an animal already in a crate at a border post. What money does not do is remove the demand, and pangolin scales will keep moving as long as there is a market for a product with no proven medical value. Funding enforcement without funding demand reduction treats the symptom. Both are needed, and the enforcement half is the part currently being asked to run on a fraction of what it requires. There is also a human cost that rarely appears in these appeals: rangers are killed doing this work, and the people staffing these units are absorbing genuine risk on behalf of a global public. One Green Planet has covered efforts to strengthen the Endangered Species Act, and Care2’s campaign sets out the funding case in full.

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