OK fans, by now you know that I have a care for all the animals of the world and I have something I want you to do for me. Today is World Pangolin Day. Chances are that you have never heard of a pangolin which is a small mammal closely related to anteaters. Pangolins are the size of a cat and they eat insects. They are utterly harmless. They are also almost going to be extinct soon if the underground Asian market is not stopped. Traditional Asian medicine believes the scales of pangolins are a cure for cancer among other things and their meat is considered to be a delicacy. The scales of a pangolin are pure keratin just like your fingernails and just like the horn of a rhino. There is nothing magic about their scales.
So today on World Pangolin Day I would ask that you stop and spend 13 minutes watching this short National Geographic clip on their plight.http://bit.ly/2lvMW8m. Stopping the slaughter requires not only educating/shaming the end-use consumer into stopping their behavior so that there’s no market, it also requires an understanding of the economic forces which drive desperately poor people into poaching plus a willingness to enforce laws to stop trafficking in animals.
You can start by educating yourself on what goes on in the world at large. The pangolin going extinct may seem irrelevant to us here in the United States, but every creature has a part to play and we harm the world when we take out any species.
The more you know….