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Abroad

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Animal traffickers are taking advantage of remote ivory trade routes to smuggle one of the world's most endangered animals out of Central Africa, new research has found.

Pangolins are scaly, ant-eating mammals.

Their meat is considered a delicacy and their scales are deemed by some to have magical medicinal properties.

Stirling University led the first ever study into how criminals were sourcing the animals from African forests.

The new study was led by Dr Katharine Abernethy of Stirling University's faculty of natural sciences and also involved the University of Sussex, Gabonese researchers and other industry partners.

It found local hunters in Gabon were selling increasing numbers of the animals to Asian workers stationed on the continent for major logging, oil exploration and agro-industry projects.

The team also discovered that the price for giant pangolins had risen at more than 45 times the rate of inflation between 2002 and 2014.

The findings are published in the African Journal of Ecology on World Pangolin Day.

It is hoped they will help law enforcers tackle the increasing problem.

The new study focused on Gabon, in Central Africa, where domestic hunting and eating of certain species of pangolin is legal.

They found that the relative value of pangolins has increased significantly since 2002.

Illegally-traded pangolins were not detected by law enforcers controlling traditional meat trade chains, but found associated with ivory trading across forest borders.

The study concluded that the high international price of scales was driving up local costs, with hunters increasingly targeting pangolins to sell them on, rather than for home consumption.

Roughly 100,000 pangolins a year are being snatched from the wild and sent to China and Vietnam.

In both those countries their meat is considered a delicacy, and their scales are deemed to have magical medicinal properties.

Already there are no pangolins left in great swathes of South East Asia, so Africa's pangolin populations are now being plundered. All eight species are threatened with extinction.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-tayside-central-43090803
 
The Chinese are effing morons when it comes to hocus pocus in creatures.
They would eat an albino midget human if you told them it would give them powers.
Stone age thinking dinguses.

Delicacies my ass...
which is also considered a Chinese delicacy I would wager.
 
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