Prior to 2017 no pangolin poacher served any jail time.
The common fine was negligible, it's probably less than 100 US dollars.
To clamp down and to lock everybody up is can be quite problematic because it is hugely
culturally acceptable, we need to make it globally available out there that this animal
is going to disappear from your culture and that is a massive thing.
Well let me give you an example of the trade I've recorded leaving the African continent
this year alone, which has run about 68.8, tons of African pangolin scales.
And that, remember, is just what we've recorded which is probably around 10% of the actual trade.
This is an extreme impact.
I don't think their populations could sustain this onslaught for the next two to three decades.
The pangolin is an ancient mammal, evolutionarily speaking 85 million years.
It's the only mammal covered in hard keratinous overlapping scales, they're completely edentate,
they can't even open their mouth.
They've got a tongue almost as long as their body, they're very closely related evolutionary
speaking to the carnivora in particular, cats.
Its physiology is quite unique to any other
animal but because it's so unique, and that it's covered in these hard overlapping scales
made out of keratin, that's its downfall.
That's what makes it so sought after.
Pangolins, both in Asia,
in particular Vietnam, and in Africa have been used as bushmeat and regarded as
a delicacy for many thousands of years, but more importantly both in Africa and Asia,
pangolins are used culturally as traditional pharmacopoeia or traditional medicine if you
want to call it that, and that also dates back many many thousands of years, and this
is a great prize and this is a great downfall is the harvest of it scales ground into
powder and added as a remedy in both traditional African and traditional Asian medicines.
There's no medicinal value to scales.
It's like biting your own nails, the same material as rhino horn.
So it has no medicinal value whatsoever.
We work in the Gulf of Guinea and Ghana and Syria.
So our organization is involved intensely in Africa and in Africa's pangolins but more
intensely in South Africa in reversing the illegal trade in the Temmick's ground pangolin.
We do have legal sting operations where we pose as buyers and we pull pangolins out of the
trade and arrest poachers.
We work very closely with covert police units, the stock theft units also working as
endangered species units, the Department of Environmental Affairs, the environmental management
inspectors.
The national prosecuting authority all collectively working together to combat this trade.
We are very much involved with police and law enforcement so when they are all about
to sting for a pangolin in the trade African Pangolin Working Group goes in.
Ray Jansen and they confiscate
the pangolin, and after all the processes with the police that pangolin comes here
for treatment and rehabilitation.
Most of them are very compromised they haven't had food for about seven to 10 days or water.
Some have been have been closed in a bag or in a drum sitting in their own urine and feces
for weeks, they often have pneumonia, they have wounds.
They need drips, they need antibiotics and quite intensive care.
This little girl is called Titi.
She was intercepted near the Zimbabwe border.
We don't know where her mom is she's supposed to be still with her mom, she's only one and
a half kilos.
She's very small, young, probably about two months old.
So she came to us and that's a yawn.
She came to us and we have to hand raise her now.
Give her milk, take her out walking until she's old enough so we can release her back into
the wild.
The most difficult thing about studying pangolins is, they are so difficult to find.
You can't get in a helicopter and fly around and see one like you would rhino and elephants.
And they're so secretive they only come out at night, they're very quiet, nobody really
knew about him until they were poached at this level because they were just going on
with their lives as normal, and now suddenly we have to find ways to study something that
hides in a hole during the day and makes no noise at night.
It's difficult.
Since we've been campaigning and been in the courts and providing testimony and aggravation
sentencing since 2017, the latest sentence we got was eight years in jail.
The maximum sentence for a pangolin poacher in this country is 10 years in jail, in collaboration,
or with or without a final 10 million South African rands.
You can't save something that you don't know exist.
They're not just a scaly hard thing they're a mammal and have personality, from the first
time I've met one, we all say it's like a bewitching, you see them for the first time
and you just fall in love.
They can't help you even though you haven't seen one, even though you're not aware of
what it doesn't mean you shouldn't care about this wonderful mystical and charismatic mammal
that's disappearing very rapidly.
The best the public can do globally out there all over the world is spread the word, spread the message,
spread the love.
That's the very best thing you can do.
We need to send out the love for this animal over the world, and we need to like we embrace
our pop icons, we need to embrace these things just as heavily just as strongly, and with
the same amount of emotion.