India’s endangered species nobody wants to save, or talk about | more lifestyle | Hindustan Times
If you saw the pangolin, you’d probably find it quite adorable. It’s a shy, stooped creature that ambles close to the ground, looking furtively at the world through beady eyes.
When threatened, this prehistoric mammal curls up into a ball, presenting a hide covered in overlapping scales so tough, they can withstand a tiger attack — or blows from an axe. These scales are also the reason the pangolin is on the endangered list. For one thing, they make it easy to capture, and impossible to kill. So about 3,500 pangolins are boiled alive in India every year (and about 10,000 worldwide, according to 2014 data from the UK-based NGO Environmental Investigation Agency).
Thus separated from the skin, the scales fetch up to Rs 15,000 per kg on the black market, to eventually be used as a ‘tonic’ in traditional Chinese medicine.
All this has made the pangolin the most-poached mammal in India — and the world. And yet there is little data on its decline; only vague estimates of how few are left; just the fact that the young are being poached so extensively to hint at how few adults probably remain.
Chances are, you’ve never even seen a picture of one.
It is, essentially, an orphan in the wild. Poached, seriously endangered and still largely ignored.
And in that sense, if in no other, the pangolin isn’t alone. Its predicament is shared by the slender loris and the red line torpedo barb, which are trapped and sold by the thousands as exotic pets. By the dugong or sea cow, which is hunted for its flesh, and the forest owlet, hunted for its supposedly magical properties. The sea cucumber, similarly, has been wiped out in many parts of the western coast, hunted as a delicacy and an ingredient in traditional Chinese and South-East Asian medicine. And the sea horse faces the same fate on the eastern coast, traded in the thousands as aquarium pets or dried curios, or ‘cures’ for asthma or sexual dysfunction.
At a time when the impact of human activity is contributing to, if not causing, climate change, species around the world are in peril, some still more than others. But within the world of endangered animals, discrimination persists.
Worldwide, the species that pull on heartstrings and purse-strings tend to either be large, powerful animals at the top of a food chain (like the tiger and whale) or charismatic creatures (like the elephant or koala bear).
The hundreds of other critically endangered species are left to make do with the scraps of attention, awareness and budgetary allotment left. Some, like the pangolin, amble into the news when their numbers drop very far or very fast, or both. Others, like the red line torpedo barb, which makes up 60% of India’s decorative fish exports, may make it to the news only when they have disappeared altogether.
