Have told you before about the horrific international trade that is pushing pangolins to the brink of extinction and spreading deadly diseases to humans. We drew attention to the danger of pangolin-human disease transmission in April last year, well before the corona crisis began. The authorities refused to listen and the result is that more than 600,000 people have died of Covid-19. Scientists tell us pangolins were involved in the transmission of the disease to humans. This means: The pangolin trade is fundamentally linked to 600,000 human deaths!
We ignore this at our peril, yet so many countries are not taking it seriously. In China, where Covid-19 first spread from animals to humans via pangolins, the government promised to stop the use of pangolins in traditional Chinese medicine and make them a protected species.
What really happened? The trade continues under ill-defined “special circumstances” and pangolins are still legally used in eight patented medicines and 72 traditional ones.
Friend, we need to band together and urge governments to tighten laws and pressure law enforcement agencies to increase their efforts to catch smugglers. We must do it because the massive use of pangolin scales in Chinese traditional medicine is fast driving them towards extinction.
As if that isn’t bad enough, there is the nightmare of pangolin-eating.
Pangolins are eaten in restaurants across Asia. The owners take a live pangolin, bludgeon it until its internal organs are pulp and it’s a mass of blood, then they toss it into a cauldron of boiling water.
Yet thousands of pangolins are suffering this fate every single day. Please help us stop this nightmare, by donating now.