In a small market somewhere in Nigeria, a woman arranges smoked bushmeat on a wooden table. In her mind, she wants to sell it all so she can settle her children’s school fees, her rent, and what will go into the pot that night.
Not too far away, a young man gets a call from a poacher. There are no jobs in his town. He has no source of income and nothing to eat. So, when the poacher offers quick cash for a strange, shy animal covered in scales, he does not ask many questions. He goes into the forest and finds the animal, a pangolin.
Pangolins today are widely regarded as the world’s most trafficked mammals. They are hunted primarily for their scales, which are used in traditional medicine in parts of Asia, and for their meat, considered a delicacy in many countries, including Nigeria. But what people do not seem to realize is the danger of constantly poaching these animals.
Pangolins spend their nights eating ants and termites, sometimes millions in a year, which helps farmers by naturally reducing pests that destroy crops and wooden structures. As they dig into the soil searching for food, they loosen and enrich the ground, allowing water and nutrients to move easily. This in turn ensures healthy forests, productive farmlands, and the balance of nature that communities depend on every day.
Despite a 2016 international ban on commercial trade and being protected under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) and Nigeria’s own wildlife regulations, illegal demand has continued to be the reason for the continuous poaching and trafficking of pangolins across Africa. Nigeria was associated with 55 percent of global pangolin scale seizures between 2016 and 2019, which positions Nigeria as a major exporter, illegally supplying Asian markets.
Still, behind every seizure statistic is a human story we rarely pause to examine. It is easy to condemn the poachers, but it somehow gets hard to confront the poverty behind it. Across many parts of Nigeria, unemployment and lack of basic amenities, including food on the table, remain stubbornly high, and knowing a pangolin can fetch more money dead than alive, many wouldn’t hesitate to take the offer.
For some of the poachers, it is mostly about survival. But sadly, every pangolin taken from the wild deepens another ecosystem crisis. When people are hungry, conservation messages will begin to sound distant and start to sound like a conspiracy theory or an act of wickedness to hinder people from getting food, even while they are hungry. If Nigeria addresses poverty and joblessness with the same urgency it brings to seizures and arrests, the supply chain can be weakened from the source.
Because in the end, this is not only a wildlife story, it is a human one, and until economic instability is addressed, the scales might just keep moving illegally.
