Are we not all guilty of the extinction crisis? Pangolin on my mind

Nature Talk
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The #Pangolin story

Observe, if you will, how we fixate on dinosaurs, sabre-toothed cats, woolly mammoths, dodos, and other extinct creatures. We excavate their bones, display them behind glass, attempt to re-engineer them, and immortalise them in books and films. We fantasise about having lived in their time, comforting ourselves with the idea that we might have done something anything to prevent their disappearance. Yet each time a species vanishes, it is not only the natural world that is diminished; we humans lose a fragment of our collective soul. What is harder to face is #extinction in the present tense.

The tree pangolin usually coiled tightly into a defensive ball when under attack. It is a posture shaped by millions of years of evolution: scales hardened like armour, a body designed to curl inward and wait out danger. Against leopards and other natural predators, this strategy once worked. Against humans, it does not. The pangolin’s story is a heartbreakingly quiet one. No roar, no spectacle, just disappearance. Known also as the scaly anteater, this shy, nocturnal mammal has become the most trafficked wild animal on Earth. Over a million pangolins are estimated to have been illegally traded in the past decade alone, their scales and meat feeding an international black market driven by myth, luxury, and profit. Add habitat loss to relentless poaching, and the result is a steady slide toward extinction.

Eight species of pangolin exist, four in Africa and four in Asia and all of them are under severe threat. In African forests and savannas, pangolins are still slipping through the undergrowth at night, still climbing trees, still doing the quiet ecological work of controlling insect populations. But they are doing so under siege, hunted not because they are dangerous or destructive, but because they are rare, defenseless, and valuable to traffickers.

World Pangolin Day, marked on the second to the last Saturday in February, asks us to pay attention to see the pangolin not as a future museum exhibit or a tragic footnote, but as a living being whose fate is being decided now. Unlike the dodo or the mammoth, the pangolin has not yet crossed the point of no return. Its extinction story is still being written, and we are unavoidably among its authors. Ekiti State Forestry Commission iNaturalist IUCN #conservationeducation @worldpangolinday2026 https://youtube.com/shorts/_SAVOdKHqKw?si=BehqJIPgzkyJSYBs

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My Pangolin Story got axed
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The problem with conservation that we don’t like to think about is that it’s just so darn messy. We love the idea of “saving the planet,” but the truth is, it’s a whole lot more complicated than planting a tree or using a hashtag. It’s awkward, because it forces us to confront the ways in which we’re all complicit in the problem.

We like to think that if another species were on the edge, if we were facing another “dodo moment,” we’d be there in a second. But the truth is, we’re facing dozens of those moments right now, and we hardly even notice. Not because we don’t care, but because the causes are all intertwined with our daily lives. Farming, development, roads, lawns, jobs, traditions, convenience—none of these things are bad, but they all take a toll on the environment in ways that we don’t notice until it’s too late.

Even something as simple as how we choose to manage our lawns has a domino effect. Cutting, spraying, removing “messy” plants—these small actions have a massive impact on losing bugs, birds, amphibians, all of it. And then when people try to advocate for native plant zones or wildlife corridors, they get shut down by HOAs or regulations that prioritize tidiness over nature. It’s crazy how often the systems we created end up working against what we say we care about.

And then there’s the global aspect of it. In a lot of regions, conservation isn’t just a moral imperative—it’s an imperative of survival. It’s hard to tell someone to save the wildlife when they’re fighting to put food on the table. That’s the part of the equation that gets swept under the rug. Conservation isn’t just about loving animals; it’s about creating a world where people don’t have to choose between preserving nature and preserving life.

So when we talk about conservation, it’s not this clean, heroic story. It’s slow, frustrating, full of trade-offs. And the thing is, it’s never as simple as “bad people killing animals.” A lot of the time, the people doing the poaching are just trying to survive. Sometimes a poacher is simply a man with a hungry family, watching his kids go to bed without food, and realizing the only way to change that is to take a risk that he wishes he didn’t have to take.

But it’s also one of the few things that genuinely matters long-term. Every time we lose a species or a habitat, we’re not just losing something “out there”—we’re shrinking the world we live in, the one our kids inherit.

That’s why these conversations matter. Not because we can fix everything overnight, but because ignoring it guarantees we won’t fix anything at all.

Sorry if I’m ranting a bit, just sharing my thoughts. :)

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I blame the wealthy people who ultimately pay the poacher. Society is unequal.

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Yeah, the pangolins are a poor example of anything being complex. It literally is “bad people killing animals” - but it’s not the actual people doing the killing, but the customers as Diana says. It’s entirely needless and could be very easily stopped without losing anything of value - if just people weren’t so damn selfish.

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I see this all the time in Australia: people who romantically mourn the loss of the thylacine within historical memory but favour killing dingoes because “they are a problem” to tourists or “they take lambs”–exactly the kind of justification that was used for killing thylacines.

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I hear that in Europe, a lot of people are very very upset about wolves and wolf reintroduction, even though there’s like…100 wolves in the whole country so wolf attack is not a likely occurrence. I myself lived in Alaska and I honestly never thought about predator attacks. Though I did see a grizzly bear with her cub while I was driving through Yukon and I stopped my car until they had completed crossing the road :)

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Why ? Is the ssp horrible ?

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I thought it perhaps wise to be cautious and not try to drive past a large bear 2 feet away from me lol

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I am with you on the quiet and patient respect for wildlife. Me too. But sad that a taxonomist used horrible as a label.

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Well, the wolverine’s scientific name is ‘gluttonous glutton’ :P

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my hot take is that lawns are bad :( ppl can have managed outdoor spaces without using horrible water guzzling ecologically dead turf grass

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Lawns have been criticised and defended in other topics. It all depends.

Where do modern landscaping practices come from? - Nature Talk - iNaturalist Community Forum

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I do agree to an extent. I really dislike heavily mowed and overly landscaped lawns, not just for the sake of wildlife, but because I just hate the look. But of course, unmowed areas do increase tick numbers. They’re great animals in their own right, but obviously you don’t want that risk near children. From experience, ticks can be surprisingly hard to notice when they’re crawling up your knee, lol.

I might add, though, that a lot of the lawn industry and related regulations were created simply to keep yards looking “tidy” and, in some people’s eyes, “nice.” As far as I’m aware, much of it wasn’t put in place for safety reasons at all.

So I should’ve phrased it better: overall, lawns have a major impact on wildlife. Turf grasses alone—covering about 2% of the surface of the continental U.S.—make up the single largest irrigated “crop” in the country.

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It is indeed wise not to get between a mother bear and her cubs!

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Wonder what THAT taxonomist looks / looked like :rofl: