ON PANGOLINS, EXTINCTION AND ENVIRONMENTAL HUSBANDRY
I can bet that most of you don’t know what a Pangolin is. I’m a trained biologist and was just barely familiar with the term. I didn't know either that the Pangolin (Smutsia gigantea) (this is one of the at least eight species) is a thirty pound insectivorous mammal which ranges (or used to) over much of sub Sahara Africa and parts of the Middle East. What is so remarkable is that the Pangolin, an animal of which so little is known, is the most poached and trafficked wild animal in the world. Biologists estimate that more than a million of these mammals have been poached from the wild and illegally traded in the last decade. At that rate of killing and removal the Pangolin will become extinct long before its name is recognizable by a few more people than it is now.
The cause of its “popularity for extinction”is often attributed to the rise of affluent Asians who have a dangerous and perverse predilection for wild animal parts to use as exotic food or for imagined aphrodisiac properties of those parts. That is only one of the motivations for the criminal poaching and trafficking of this species...and other well known critters such as rhinos and elephants. But the underlying cause is the loss of habitat, and distractions to the natural world wrought by the earth’s dominant and most destructive species—man.
We all know of the plight of African elephants which are killed at the horrible rate of one every 15 minutes. Their deaths are for no other purpose than to collect their tusks—-to make worthless trinkets again for the Asian market. Once this magnificent species existed in the millions over all of Africa—now their populations are down to a tiny fraction—perhaps 400,000. We know too that elephants have a two year gestation cycle and can not possibly replace their losses to poaching by natural reproduction. The math is simple, the remaining elephant herds are slowing but surely being reduced to zero. Without huge effort and persistent protection extinction is a sad but sure-bet certainty.
The story is the same for the Bengal tiger, the African lion, the African wild dog, the rhino and many many other species on the road to certain extinction—-like the pangolin—a species which most of us simply don’t even know existed. The problem is not restricted to the terrestrial environment either—-all of our creatures— birds, fish and mammals are under similar threats. Many marine critters are on the verge of extinction—and like the Pangolin, we don’t even know of them when they are gone. The beautiful diversity of the gene pools of these species which took half a billion years to evolve will be gone in a only few decades..
The problem is not localized in the land of the Pangolin but in all of Africa, South America, Asia and North America—as well as the world oceans. Extinction, loss of habitat, destruction of environment, pollution are all global phenomena. Wherever we look, whether in our suburban backyards, or the once vast and untouched jungles of Brazil, urbanized Homo sapiens has become the intruder, the dominant species which alters the environment to suit its perverse needs— it kills—-it disposes its wastes, exploits soli, forests, land and water. It exterminates native species, it displaces, and irreplaceably alters the habitat of all other species. The only habitats this species creates and increases are niches for the ubiquitous Norway rat, the cockroach, and the various commensal and parasitic bacteria and viruses which inhabit and prey on the physical body of Homo sapiens.
So if we are to maintain the habitability of this planet—-the only one we have—or will ever have—we must staunch the unrelenting destruction of the living planet, the biosphere of which we are an integral part and upon which we (unknown to most of us) depend for our lives. For whether we understand the complexity of biological interactions or not we are all part of a vast web of life that is today under terminal existential threat. We must all be aware of our impact on our environment and each of us must strive to become better husbands of the natural world around us.
All our future actions must in some way help the survival of the diverse life our our planet. We must turn from harmful destructive habits—-to actions which are environmentally sustainable and positive for the survival of our fragile environment.
We must all turn toward modifying our lifestyles to help support life—other life—- like the Pangolin. For all around us other species are desperately struggling to survive.
They have a right to existence—-as much as we have—-in some cases more!
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