When I was young
every day I go to forest,
seeing the nature and the wildlife.
I start seeing
the forest being cut down, the animal being hunted.
When I was about ten years old, I saw the two poachers
they took one mother with a baby pangolin,
and they put it in the bag and took home. The mother tried
to protect the baby
but she cannot
and that is something I feel very sad.
My dream job is to become a ranger to protect the forest.
I saw many wildlife conservation programs.
They have a time to start and finish after they finish
everything, it disappear very quickly.
So I really wanted to build up
a nonprofit organization in Vietnam with a Vietnamese leadership
and try to make it long-term and stable.
I started working with Leanne in 2006,
so Leanne came in with her experience working with wildlife.
So when we start with the pangolin conservation in Vietnam, it's
the first pangolin rescue center exists in Asia.
And, we called it the pangolarium.
That was the, you know, the little enclosure.
And like everything happens,
the first pangolins arrived before it was finished.
We were told that there were five pangolins for us to rescue,
and we turned up to the ranger station
and there were just pangolins in sacks, curled up in balls on the ground.
And I remember seeing a motorbike with a pangolin on it.
We were told that we could take
the five that were most likely to survive.
And, I remember driving home that night
with those pangolins, and we were half elated, you know,
but also devastated because there are registered wildlife traders.
And so the rest of the animals were auctioned to legal
wildlife traders.
So we got back to find the crew still busily building and, you know,
trying to finish this enclosure for them.
And, when we let the pangolins in and oh they ate
They are very difficult species to keep in captivity.
We don't know how to feed them, what type of medicine, how to treat them.
Very little was known about pangolins.
Very little was written.
There wasn't many people working on them
and we just saw a need.
We start watching them every night for like three months.
Every night we wake up from 5 pm
to 5 am.
watching the animal and see how they are doing.
We became really attuned to the sound of them waking up and eating
and they sniff, you know, so the first thing they do is they come out and they sniff.
Some of them will be awake for 9 minutes,
but we would sit there all night freezing.
The pangolin is very special.
They are covered by the scale to protect themselves
they just curl up into the ball and no, no other animal can eat them.
They very shy, compared with many other species the pangolin is very slow.
So they're very confident and they just stay in the burrow
and not moving very far.
This is the most traded mammal in the world.
We will drive this animal to extinction
that they will become extinct without doubt,
because people like to eat them or use their scales
in traditional medicine.
After they catch the pangolin they tie the pangolin very strong
so the animal cannot move .
To make the animals heavier
before they selling to another trader,
they try to force feed the animal.
They make powder together with water and egg
And they pump inside the belly.
Sometimes they use a syringe to inject the water under the skin.
So animal often very weak during the trade.
A lot of animal dies very quickly.
I am really surprised at how little people's understandings have changed.
You know, there has certainly not been a cessation in trade,
despite COVID,
The trades' reach just gets wider and wider.
So it's a completely an international trade now
and we have not just pangolins, but reptiles and birds, mammals
from all over the world, you know, making their way
along different trade routes to some of the major markets.
It's an absolute melting pot of species and all different organisms,
not just viruses being shared to animals that are naive.
And then people and their domestic livestock.
The wildlife trade
will remain a threat for human health while the wildlife trade continues.
That's a given.
In Vietnam, we start
using the new technology like poacher cam.
So whenever they take the picture of the poacher, they send directly
to one of the phone number of the ranger and then we can organize
to catch them.
People will often say, oh, you know, what's a rescue center going to do?
Well, it allows law enforcement to happen, you know, because the rangers
who are doing the confiscating, they know that these animals
can actually go to a rescue center and there is hope.
And it does mean something, what they're doing.
We got information from the police in Bac Kan Province
in the north of Vietnam, near China.
The animal being transported illegally from across
the border between Lao into Vietnam and heading to China.
The police had confiscated them and called me.
If those animals are being confiscated on the border of China.
They could have been captured in Indonesia or Thailand or Laos,
they're not necessarily from Vietnam.
So those animals potentially have been in a long
and really horrible journey up to that point.
they're dehydrated, they might be injured.
You have to have people who know how to look after them as well.
Together with 3 other pangolins, the mother,
when she came to the the centre, the vet, they scanned and they saw she,
have a baby about 4 months old. Because the baby is already quite big,
so we keep her in the center and she gave birth.
We transport them into the forest and in the night time
we start to release them because the pangolin are nocturnal.
Anyone who's involved in wildlife rescue and, and rehabilitation.
The aim is always release, but that's why we do this.
And so it's such an amazing experience, you know,
because you've done everything you can and off they go.
We have a anti-poaching team and they are still
like daily spend time patrol in that area.
But so far we haven't heard if they seeing Moi or mother.
I think, because the forest very dense
and I think they are happy in the forest at the moment.
One of the criteria for release to the wild is
that the threat has been mitigated, that we've already managed that threat
and we haven't, like we haven't! There's there's a massive trade and
there is
all likelihood that some of those pangolins end up back in that trade again.
How, how absolutely heartbreaking is that?
We rescue over 2,000 individual animal from illegal wildlife trade.
Nearly 60 percent of them are released back to the wild.
So we start seeing the recovery of the wildlife in the forests in Vietnam.
We need to get everyone together,
together we can save the wildlife, save pangolins
I believe we can do this
if we together take action.