CHINA HAS GRANTED\u00a0a reprieve to the world\u2019s most trafficked nonhuman mammal\u2014the pangolin. The country\u2019s 2020 list of approved traditional medicines does not include pangolin scales, as it has for decades. The scales have long been sold in traditional pharmacies in China as an ingredient in legally allowed medications to treat everything from lactation problems to arthritis.<\/p>\n
Medicinal use of the scales has pushed the world\u2019s pangolin species\u2014four in \u201cThis is the single greatest measure that could be taken to save the\u00a0pangolins<\/a>,\u201d says Peter Knights, CEO of the environmental nonprofit WildAid, an organization that focuses on reducing demand for wildlife products. \u201cThis sends a clear message that there are alternatives in traditional Chinese medicine and so you don\u2019t need to use pangolins,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n The revelation that scales are no longer an approved medicinal comes days after China announced that it was upgrading pangolins\u2019 standing under the country\u2019s wildlife protection law. Pangolins now are ranked Class 1\u2014the status given to the nation\u2019s beloved panda\u2014which prohibits almost all domestic trade and use of the animals.<\/p>\n China did not officially unveil its 2020 pharmacopeia or release a statement about the omission of pangolins. Instead, the development was first reported by\u00a0China\u2019s Health Times<\/a>\u00a0newspaper.<\/p>\n \u201cChina will often intentionally let an announcement like this come out through the press rather than a formal announcement,\u201d says Paul Thomson, executive director and cofounder of the San Francisco-based group Save Pangolins. He says he\u2019s \u201ccautiously optimistic\u201d about the unexpected news.<\/p>\n Chinese officials did not respond to National Geographic\u2019s request for comment by publication time.<\/p>\n Questions remain about what China will do with its stockpiles of pangolin scales. In the past, companies have been able to draw on stockpiles even after products have been banned, creating enough ambiguity that some commercial domestic trade in those products would persist. For example, a 2006 regulation allowed companies to\u00a0sell out existing leopard bone inventory<\/a>, without disclosing how much they had in stock, says Chris Hamley, a pangolin expert at the London-based Environment Investigation Agency.<\/p>\n International trade in pangolins or their scales has been prohibited since 2017 under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, the global treaty that regulates international wildlife trade.<\/p>\n Any formal announcements from China\u2019s government about use of pangolin stockpiles or the omission of pangolin scales from the nation\u2019s pharmacopeia list will likely be slowed by an ongoing controversy about the animal. Connections have been rumored\u2014but not proven\u2014between pangolins that may have been sold at the wet market in Wuhan and the original spread of the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 among humans, Thomson says.<\/p>\n Most evidence suggests that bats are the likeliest reservoir for the virus, with a very\u00a0closely related virus<\/a>\u00a0found in horseshoe bats. But it\u2019s not yet known whether an intermediary species\u2014perhaps pangolins\u2014may have acquired the virus from bats and transmitted it to humans. (Learn more about the role animals may play in the coronavirus spread<\/a>.)<\/p>\n Lixin Huang, vice president of operations and China projects at the San Francisco-based California Institute of Integral Studies, says that although she hasn\u2019t seen the 2020 pharmacopeia list, she is pleased to hear about the reported change. She credits the efforts of wildlife conservation organizations to save pangolins, and now also the international pressure related to the coronavirus. \u201cCoronavirus was another key trigger point,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n After the coronavirus pandemic spread in early 2020, China banned the consumption of wildlife and slashed the list of animals it considers domestic and thus consumable. The use of some wild animals for traditional medicine, however, is still permitted.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n
\nAsia and four in Africa\u2014toward extinction<\/a>. Tens of thousands of the animals, which resemble scaly anteaters, are killed annually for their meat\u2014considered a luxury food in China and Vietnam\u2014as well as their scales, curved disks of keratin, the same substance that’s in human fingernails.<\/p>\n