Focus on Arts and Ecology

Let’s not mince our words here. What humanity has done to pangolins in recent years has been utterly unforgivable.

These wonderful, wonderful creatures have been on the planet since the time of the dinosaurs. They’ve kept themselves to themselves, being harmless enough that their most reliable form of resistance is to roll up into a ball and wait until the danger goes away.

In doing so, they’ve successfully avoided confrontation for generations, peacefully waddling through the wilds, searching for ants, with their babies riding around on their tails.

But that’s changed. Wholly. In today’s world they’re being ceaselessly assaulted and obliterated from every single angle.

Their homes are being hammered by deforestation. Their food source is being wiped out by pesticides. They’re waddling into newly erected electric fences that cause them to curl up around the wire and meet an unspeakably gruesome end.

Above all else, they’re being poached - poached at a rate that is desperate beyond words.

They’re being ripped from the wild and shipped across the world - sometimes alive, to be displayed - terrified - outside restaurants. There are even reports of them brought wriggling to a table to be slaughtered in front of would-be diners as proof that it’s real pangolin they’re about to eat.

This is a crisis like no other, and the numbers behind it are simply staggering.

The statistic on individual pangolins that have been ripped from the wild, trafficked and butchered is now sitting in the millions. That's more than any other mammal in recent history.

All this unremitting slaughter merely serves to line the pockets of the traffickers, and for the humble, harmless pangolin it’s proving more than they can take.

Unless we can get protection in place soon - in a really, really big way - then they’re not going to survive. Their 80-million-year history will end now, with us, as a damning example of how humanity put profits above its planet.

And that’s where you come in.

The task ahead is enormous, but through your support, we’ve done this before - we’ve halted forest loss, we’ve brought down gangs, we’ve changed laws. Saving these creatures will take all of that - and more - but through your donations we can end this bitter spiral of destruction.

With your gifts today, we could help save these wonderful animals. One pangolin at a time.