The world's most-trafficked mammal - and the scaliest

The gentle, solitary pangolin has a tongue as long as its body and curls into a ball when threatened. It is also the world's most trafficked mammal, and threatened with extinction.

In front of a drab government building near Vietnam's northern border with China, a young conservationist named Nguyen Van Thai prises open a flimsy wooden crate with a machete.

He lifts out four plastic sacks and places them on the ground. From each sack he pulls out a brownish-black ball with a scaly exterior, roughly the size and weight of an curling stone.

Gradually - and very, very cautiously - one of those balls begins to uncurl, revealing two blackcurrant eyes, a long snout, an even longer tail and a soft pink belly. It's a pangolin, one of the world's more remarkable creatures.

The pangolin is the only mammal wholly covered in scales, and it simply curls itself into an impregnable ball when threatened by predators.

It eats seven million ants and termites a year using a tongue that's almost as long as its body. It has no teeth, so it stores stones in its stomach to grind up its food.

The reason many of us have never heard of pangolins is because they seldom survive in captivity. Only six zoos in the world - and only one in Europe, Leipzig - have any.

Pangolins enjoy one other unfortunate distinction - they are the world's most trafficked mammal.

While the media focuses on the plight of the elephant and the rhinoceros, the celebrities of the natural world, roughly 100,000 pangolins a year are being snatched from the wild and sent to China and Vietnam.

In both those countries their meat is considered a delicacy, and their scales are deemed to have magical medicinal properties.

Already there are no pangolins left in great swathes of South East Asia, so Africa's pangolin populations are now being plundered. All eight species are threatened with extinction.

In both those countries their meat is considered a delicacy, and their scales are deemed to have magical medicinal properties.

Already there are no pangolins left in great swathes of South East Asia, so Africa's pangolin populations are now being plundered. All eight species are threatened with extinction.

They resemble artichokes on legs. They are gentle, solitary creatures with an almost comic rolling gait. They carry their young on their tails and curl round them to protect them. They use those prehensile tails to hang from branches, or to stretch out almost horizontally to reach ants' nests.

From BBC News-Magazine

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