CHINESE PANGOLIN in Hong Kong shop Michael Webster
out of Africa finds a legal haven in Hong Kong, where the trade is so large (imports worth US$ 15m in 1975) that no Hong Kong Government is likely to do anything to hinder it, even though the export may be illegal in its country of origin. Many more animals are taken from the wild than reach the Hong Kong shops, and cruelty in the shops is normal. The bills of shrikes are snapped off with pliers, and those of owls wired shut; pangolins normally arrive in Hong Kong in a state of severe dehydration; snakes are skinned alive. But cruelty is usually so difficult to define that prosecutions or con- victions are almost impossible to obtain. For example, the regulations on cage size merely say that it must be adequate, and there is nothing to prevent prey and predator being housed in adjacent cages. Delicate species, such as the smaller.birds, must suffer immense losses between capture and final sale. We have seen many mammals with legs smashed in gin-traps, including the masked palm civet Paguma larvata, which the Government maintains, on the evidence of a 'traveller in China', is bred in captivity.
The scale of the trade must also be having an effect. When each village trapped civets and pangolins for its own use, it would probably only tap a small territory in the immediate vicinity, and, as stocks in the trapping terri- tory were depleted, other animals would move in to fill the gap; but when all territory is trapped there is no surplus population anywhere to replace those caught. This applies particularly to pangolins. Their diet is restricted to the house termite Coptotermes formosanus, which means that they cannot exist in large numbers in any one place. Yet 2271 are known to have been imported into Hong Kong in 1972, 7004 in 1973, and 3426 in 1974, and these figures are undoubtedly conservative, as they only represent pangolins handled by the three main importers and reported by them to the Department of Agriculture
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