- African pangolins are heavily hunted to meet the international demand for scales as well as for their meat in the local bushmeat trade. But how much each contributes to the hunting of these beleaguered mammals in various parts of Nigeria, a trafficking hub, is unclear.
- For a recent study, researchers interviewed more than 800 hunters and meat vendors in southeast Nigeria, a poaching hotspot, and found that hunters almost always hunt pangolins opportunistically, mostly for their meat rather than their scales.
- Hunters ranked pangolin meat highly for its palatability, and told researchers they ate most of it themselves, or sold it. Because local demand for scales is limited, nearly 70% of the scales are simply discarded.
- Conservationists say understanding the local drivers of demand helps design targeted conservation strategies, such as providing alternative livelihoods and food security.
When headline after headline highlights tons of pangolin scale seizures in Nigeria, it’s easy to presume that most pangolin poaching in the country is driven by the international demand for the scales. A recently published research, however, finds that in Nigeria’s Cross River state, pangolins are hunted for their meat — much-prized locally — rather than for scales, with implications for conservation actions to protect the world’s most trafficked mammal.
When Charles Emogor, who hails from southeast Nigeria, started his Ph.D. research at the University of Cambridge, U.K., he expected to find that the demand for scales for traditional medicine in East Asia is a leading driver for hunting pangolins, as has been documented elsewhere.
Nigeria is a pangolin trade hub with nearly 190 tons of scales seized in the country between 2010 and 2021, estimated to have come from around 800,000 African pangolins, according to a 2021 study co-authored by Emogor. The Cross River forest landscape lies in a biodiversity hotspot and is home to three species of pangolins: the vulnerable black-bellied pangolin (Phataginus tetradactyla), the endangered white-bellied pangolin (P. tricuspis) and the endangered giant pangolin (Smutsia gigantea).
While hunting pangolins — for any reason — has been illegal in Nigeria since 1985, the study estimates that between 2020 and 2023, 3,600 hunters killed around 21,000 pangolins every year in the Cross River forests. As Emogor began talking to people — hunters, bushmeat vendors and community members — they told him that when they are out for a hunt, they kill any animals they come across, including pangolins. But they value pangolins for their meat, not their scales.
Intrigued, Emogor began collecting data about the pangolin trade, motivations for poaching, and trade dynamics in southeast Nigeria, a pangolin stronghold and a poaching hub.
For this current study, published in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution, Emogor and his colleagues interviewed more than 800 hunters and bushmeat vendors across 33 locations in southeastern Nigeria to gather data on pangolins hunted, methods used to hunt, motivation behind the hunt, and prices of meat and scales between 2020 and 2023.
They found that pangolins were valued primarily for their meat, which locals found highly palatable. While the hunters did not particularly target pangolins on their hunt, they consumed almost all the meat themselves and traded a small part. When they did sell their pangolin catch, they discarded nearly 70% of the scales because, while meat fetches high prices, there were few local buyers for scales.
“The research actually underscores the importance of understanding regional drivers of exploitation in order to design effective conservation strategies,” Olajumoke Morenikeji, chair of the Nigeria-based NGO Pangolin Conservation Guild Nigeria, who was not involved in the study, told Mongabay. She is also the West African chair for the Pangolin Specialist Group at the IUCN, the global wildlife conservation authority.
Pangolin meat: Palatable and profitable over scales
Nearly two-thirds of the more than 20,000 pangolins Emogor and his colleagues estimate were killed by hunters in Cross River each year were endangered white-bellied pangolins. Most of these pangolins were encountered by chance — formal hunters entering the forest in search of wild meat picked up any pangolins they came across, accounting for 59% of the take estimated by the survey. The rest were taken by casual hunters, who either caught them in wire snares set to catch any small or medium-sized mammals or spotted them while walking in the forest or working on a farm and popped them in a bag to eat later. Hunters almost never targeted pangolins on their hunts, but they always picked up a pangolin if they saw one.
Most hunters said they caught pangolins to eat them — seven out of 10 hunters said they ate the pangolins themselves because they find their meat tasty, rating it more delicious than any other wild or domestic meat, fish or invertebrates. Only about 25% of them said they sold the meat.
“What was so interesting was how much the hunters themselves were eating [the meat],” Emogor, who is now a Schmidt Science Fellow exploring the use of artificial intelligence to combat poaching, told Mongabay. “A lot of people who hunt will sell a huge fraction of what they capture, but in this instance, they were eating 70% and only selling a tiny fraction.”
The researchers say the meat-driven exploitation of the world’s most trafficked mammal is not restricted to southeast Nigeria but is a trend seen across West Africa, as hunters report hunting similar numbers of pangolins, people consider the meat palatable, and the price of scales are relatively low compared to that of the meat.
Morenikeji said she wasn’t surprised that the demand for pangolin meat is driving a big part of the poaching because the meat is “culturally accepted” in many parts of Nigeria, particularly in rural and peri-urban communities. “Most people kill pangolins to eat — you find them being sold on the roadside as a delicacy.”
Although large quantities of African pangolin scales are exported from Nigeria, the study found that most hunters in southeast Nigeria threw away the scales from the pangolins they hunted. Only about a third said they sold them. Since a pangolin’s meat fetched 3-4 times as much money as its scales in the local market, there was no financial incentive to trade the scales. Emogor attributes this muted trade in scales to the lack of access to transnational trafficking networks in this part of Nigeria — but that could soon change, he said.
“It’s all a matter of price, access and information … and if these three things are available, people will start killing pangolins for [their] scales, and it’s going to make the situation worse.”
Morenikeji told Mongabay that traffickers operating in southwest Nigeria, home to Lagos, the commercial hub through which many shipments of pangolin scales are illegally exported, use “[well-]developed transport and export infrastructure” to source pangolins from across West and Central Africa and ship the scales abroad. She said bushmeat vendors in markets in this part of the country are well aware of the value of scales, and regularly bagged them to be sold to middlemen who came collecting.
Need for targeted interventions to combat poaching
The study’s findings highlight the need to consider local consumption patterns in parts of Africa to design effective conservation strategies for pangolins.
“Enforcement of the law is one thing,” Emogor said. “We need to be looking at the social aspect as well … If people are hunting a species for food, whether it’s intentional or not, there’s a food security issue.” He suggested providing alternative livelihoods for hunters who rely on wild meat for food and livelihoods — an aspect incorporated into Nigeria’s national strategy to combat wildlife crimes.
Morenikeji said such alternative livelihoods could include sustainable agriculture, poultry farming or grasscutter (also called the greater cane rat) farming.
“Hunting and trade in Nigeria actually require a multi-dimensional approach that will tackle poverty, strengthen law enforcement, promote alternative livelihood, raise awareness, [and] incorporate culturally sensitive conservation education,” she said. “Without urgent and coordinated action, the survival of these unique mammals in the world remains at a grave risk.”
Banner image: A white-bellied pangolin on a tree in Nigeria. This critically endangered species is one of the three species of pangolins found in the Cross River landscape. Image courtesy of Alex Moore.
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Citations:
Emogor, C. A., Wasser, S. K., Coad, L., Balmford, B., Ingram, D. J., Wijesinghe, A., . . . Balmford, A. (2025). Pangolin hunting in southeast Nigeria is motivated more by local meat consumption than international demand for scales. Nature Ecology & Evolution, 9, 1349–1358. doi:10.1038/s41559-025-02734-3
Emogor, C. A., Ingram, D. J., Coad, L., Worthington, T. A., Dunn, A., Imong, I., & Balmford, A. (2021). The scale of Nigeria’s involvement in the trans-national illegal pangolin trade: Temporal and spatial patterns and the effectiveness of wildlife trade regulations. Biological Conservation, 264, 109365. doi:10.1016/j.biocon.2021.109365
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