The endangered Indian pangolin, long targeted by poachers for illegal trade of its scales and meat, has declined by 80% in Pakistan.Now poaching is compounded by disappearing habitat, rising human population and encroaching infrastructure in six districts of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, a mountainous region in northwestern Pakistan that has been important habitat, according to new research.To mitigate this, the region’s wildlife department created four protected pangolin protection zones in Pakistan.
Tariq Mahmood was alarmed when he found 19 sacks tucked away in a railway tunnel in the Chakwal district of northern Pakistan. Their contents were extremely disturbing: 45 rotting pangolin carcasses, all devoid of their distinct, orange-and-light-brown scales. That was in 2012.
“It was very difficult to see these innocent, dead bodies,” said Mahmood, a wildlife biologist at Pir Mehr Ali Shah Arid Agriculture University in Pakistan, who began studying pangolins in 2009.
Finding so many slain Indian pangolins (Manis crassicaudata) alerted Mahmood to a dark truth. Poachers were paying local citizens to capture them, so the overlapping scales that cover their bodies — the pangolin’s first line of defense — could be sold into the illegal wildlife trade. “It was terrible to know that.”
