- The endangered Indian pangolin, long targeted by poachers for illegal trade of its scales and meat, has declined by 80% in Pakistan.
- Now poaching is compounded by disappearing habitat, rising human population and encroaching infrastructure in six districts of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, a mountainous region in northwestern Pakistan that has been important habitat, according to new research.
- To mitigate this, the region’s wildlife department created four protected pangolin protection zones in Pakistan.
Tariq Mahmood was alarmed when he found 19 sacks tucked away in a railway tunnel in the Chakwal district of northern Pakistan. Their contents were extremely disturbing: 45 rotting pangolin carcasses, all devoid of their distinct, orange-and-light-brown scales. That was in 2012.
“It was very difficult to see these innocent, dead bodies,” said Mahmood, a wildlife biologist at Pir Mehr Ali Shah Arid Agriculture University in Pakistan, who began studying pangolins in 2009.
Finding so many slain Indian pangolins (Manis crassicaudata) alerted Mahmood to a dark truth. Poachers were paying local citizens to capture them, so the overlapping scales that cover their bodies — the pangolin’s first line of defense — could be sold into the illegal wildlife trade. “It was terrible to know that.”
At the time, global conservationists were realizing that demand for pangolin was driving trade, mostly to China. “We first saw the emergence of this intercontinental trafficking around 2010, and it’s continued to take place since then,” said Dan Challender, a pangolin expert at the University of Oxford who has studied international wildlife trade for 15 years.
This shy, toothless, nocturnal animal has become the world’s most-trafficked mammal. When Asia’s four species were nearly poached to extinction, traders turned to the four African species and their numbers soon plummeted. All pangolins are on the IUCN Red list: Four of them, including the Indian pangolin, are endangered, and three hang on the brink, critically endangered.
Pangolin scales command substantial prices on the black market. The demand is driven by the belief that this animal’s keratin scales, as well as its meat, fetuses, bones blood and some organs, possess healing properties: They’re expensive ingredients in traditional Chinese medicine and are used, to a much lesser degree, by traditional healers in Sub-Saharan Africa. The pangolin is also the subject of superstition — and killed as a result.
Now they face an additional, growing threat, according to new research. Pangolins are increasingly displaced by Pakistan’s mushrooming human population and the development they bring.
Shrinking habitat
Key pangolin habitats are disappearing in the rural, mountainous northern province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. It’s Pakistan’s third-densest area: The human population is about 41 million.
To support the province’s growing population, the local government launched infrastructure plans in 2010 that included new roads, mining, energy projects, industry and other development. It fractured remaining pangolin habitat; their numbers plummeted by 18-35% over the last two decades, according to new research published in the Journal for Nature Conservation.
To understand the environmental effects of urbanization, the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Wildlife Department released historical records about these scaly mammals to the research team in 2021, including ecologist Tariq Ahmad. He launched a study in six of the 35 districts in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.
A pangolin survey had been conducted there in 2000 at 102 study sites across the diverse landscapes that pangolins inhabit, from barren hills and mountains to valleys. “In 2000, pangolins were present at many sites,” Ahmad said.
Ahmad began revisiting those sites in 2021 alongside researchers from the Wildlife Department. Over the next two years, they encountered signs of pangolins in just 67 of those areas. The rest appeared to be abandoned.
“It was heartbreaking to return to sites where pangolins once thrived and find them replaced by roads and buildings. We are pushing this species to the edge,” he said, adding that “we need to take serious action [to protect them].”
The shift in land use also worries Asim Haider, a wildlife ecologist and conservationist with the World Wildlife Fund in Pakistan, who was not involved in the study. “When there is habitat fragmentation [or] urbanization, the pangolin is going to migrate from one place to another place,” he said.
These docile, nocturnal animals are highly adaptable, but they prefer living in forests, farmlands and grasslands, areas with gentle elevation and minimal precipitation, in a climate similar to Dallas, Texas, or Madrid, Spain. This provides suitable conditions for pangolins to dig their 1.5- to 6-meter (5- to 20-foot) burrows.
They also need room to move, venturing as far as 4 kilometers (2 miles) outside their often hilly home ranges to search for their favorite foods — ants and termites — which they detect through the sweet odor emitted from these insects’ nests.
Climate change is another compounding factor. Drought, scorching heat waves and floods are becoming more common in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. Temperatures reached 50° Celsius (122° Fahrenheit) in May 2025. A few months later, flash floods caused by heavy monsoon rains destroyed pangolin habitat and killed 333 people.
As roads, development and extreme weather encroach, damaging their habitat, the pangolin population has diminished by 25-40% over the last 25 years in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Ahmad said.
Displacement and deadly beliefs
As habitat shreds and disappears, pangolins are migrating into new areas. Floods and development also drown or displace them. “When the water goes inside the burrows, [pangolins] just come out,” Haider said, adding that “flash floods take the pangolins to areas with people who don’t know about [them].”
Some communities have little knowledge of have little knowledge of these animals, hear misinformation — and fear them. A common, deadly myth persists.
“In Pakistan, we have different misperceptions towards the Indian pangolins,” Haider said. “Muslims are hearing that the Indian pangolins are entering the graveyard — into the graves — and they are eating human remains.”
One area where Haider sees this happening is Mardan, the region’s second-largest city and a hub for wildlife trafficking. It’s true that these animals are found in cemeteries: They’re insectivores and the rich earth offers good feeding grounds — for bugs, not human flesh.
But because they’re thought to be magical or cursed, some people are afraid of pangolins, and some kill or torment them.
Minimal knowledge sparks other casualties. Some people consider them an agricultural pest, though they don’t damage crops and actually save farmers money.
“They are the natural pest controller. They eat all the termites and ants,” Haider said — around 70 million a year. One pangolin can protect some 16 hectares (41 acres) of forest from termite damage, an area the size of 31 football fields, according to the nonprofit Nature Conservancy.
They also provide important ecosystem services: tilling, aerating and turning over the soil while excavating their burrows.
Haider noted that people who kill pangolins are not necessarily selling their scales, but pangolin trafficking is big business.
The international market
Pangolins are poached and trafficked as part of a massive global trade in illegal wildlife. It’s run by international criminal networks that pay local citizens to capture pangolins. The animals sell on the black market for roughly $5,000 each, Haider said. China is the main consumer, though demand also comes from Vietnam and other Southeast Asian nations. Globally, wildlife trade is worth up to $23 billion annually, according to U.N. estimates.
At some Asian restaurants, people consume pangolin fetus soup or meat to flaunt wealth or influence, while others eat it as a source of protein or to promote lactation, Challender said.
The scales are in high demand in traditional Chinese medicine, believed to hold special curative powers. Practitioners grind them up to treat inflammation, asthma, rheumatism, arthritis and other conditions. There is no evidence to support their efficacy.
In Pakistan and across all the Asian and African landscapes that pangolins inhabit, this demand is wiping them out. Addressing the trade is critical to slow their decline, Ahmad said.
Trade in Pakistan
Ahmad calculated that 179 Indian pangolins were killed in four districts of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa between 2019 and 2022, a third of them poached, while the cause of death for nearly half is unknown. Challender noted that when it comes to tracking illegal wildlife trade, numbers are difficult to accurately estimate.
Between January 2020 and December 2024, law enforcement intervened in 87 pangolin trafficking incidents, confiscating 217 kilograms (478 pounds) of dried scales, 11 live animals and six carcasses, according to a preprint study. An estimated 276 pangolins were killed, and the value of scales increased exponentially as they were trafficked. In situ, poachers earned about 15,000 Pakistan rupees per kilogram ($24.50 per pound). Elsewhere in Pakistan, scales fetched 37,850 rupees/kg ($61.40/lb), and they sold for up to $76,384 on the international market.
The same study found that most poachers, 151 in total, were men between 21 and 33 years old.
Meanwhile, pangolin deaths were previously much higher in Pakistan, Mahmood said.: 1,922 dead pangolins were documented from 2011 to 2018.
There are several possible reasons for this decline in deaths. Poaching has decimated populations, so there are fewer pangolins to hunt. Education programs, particularly in religious communities, may be dispelling dangerous misinformation about the animal.
There are also stiffer penalties for poaching. Starting in 2011, the Punjab Wildlife & Parks Department fined poachers that were apprehended in the Chakwal district between 10,000 and 60,000 rupees ($36-$215). Now, penalties are increasing to 20,000-60,000 rupees ($72-$215), paired with 1-4 months or even years of prison time, depending on the case, according to Mahmood and Haider. For context, the average daily wage in Pakistan is 1,423 rupees ($5.11).
Experts in Pakistan say that overall, trade is declining. “We feel that it is getting better now, as compared to [what it] was in the past,” Mahmood said.
Preserving Pakistan’s last pangolins
Mahmood’s grisly discovery sparked awareness of Pakistan’s involvement in the trade. That news made its way to the IUCN Pangolin Specialist Group. Several conservationists, including Mahmood, soon discovered that poachers were smuggling the animals across the border to China, information that he published in the Pakistan Journal of Zoology.
“In 2012, they held a person in China who was carrying about 25 kg (55 lb) of pangolin scales,” Mahmood said. “He confessed that he had brought these scales from Islamabad.”
To save the country’s remaining Indian pangolins, the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Wildlife Department established four pangolin protection zones in Pakistan, starting in 2018.
One is in Mardan, where the department just released a pangolin into the wild. Two of these areas were previously protected: Nizampur National Park, shrubby forest land in northern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, and Margalla Hills National Park, located in the rugged limestone landscape and valleys in the Himalayan foothills. Another location, Kallar Syedan, is a mix of hilly terrain and forest cover.
Now, wildlife authorities are more vigilant, with guards monitoring these areas for any illegal activity. Haider said these zones help build conservation awareness in local communities.
Education is also crucial. “If we did a door-to-door survey, and we spread the conservation message to every home, it [would] be very helpful,” Ahmad said.
For now, Ahmad and Haider remain concerned.
“This is the most important species for our ecosystems,” Haider said.
Banner image: An Indian pangolin in India. Image by Ajit Huilgol via Flickr (CC BY 2.0).
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Citations:
Wassem, M., Raza, A., Aisha, H., Naeem Awan M., & Ahmad, T. (2019). Scale of Illegal Killing and Trade Associated with Indian Pangolin (Manis crassicaudata) in Pakistan. Pakistan Journal of Zoology. doi:10.17582/journal.pjz/2020.52.1.69.77
Ahmad, T., Ali, A., Akrim, F., Li, B., Ahmad, F., & Dinislam, K. (2026). Spatiotemporal dynamics of land use and Indian pangolin habitat in western Pakistan: Insights from Landsat imagery and generalized linear models. Global Ecology and Conservation. doi:10.1016/j.gecco.2025.003747
Hussain, S., Asrar, M., Saleem, U., Hussain, D., Sohail, M., Saleem, M., & Ali, R. (2024). Termites onslaught in Pakistan: An in-depth review of agricultural impacts. Pakistan Journal of Agricultural Research, 37(2), 146–157. doi:10.17582/journal.pjar/2024/37.2.146.157
Mahmood, T., Hussain, R., Akrim, F., & Nadeem, N. S. (2012). Illegal Mass Killing of Indian Pangolin (Manis crassicaudata) in Potohar Region, Pakistan. Pakistan Journal of Zoology. Retrieved from https://www.zsp.com.pk/pdf44/1457-1461_41_%20SHORT%20COMMUNICATIONS_.pdf
Saad, M., Sah, M., & Anuar, S. (2025). Illegal Trade Networks and Law Enforcement Challenges of Indian Pangolins (Manis crassicaudata) in Northern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Pakistan. SSRN preprint, doi:10.2139/ssrn.5421455
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Cite this article
Emma Smith (2026). Beyond wildlife trade: Endangered pangolins are losing habitat in Pakistan. Mongabay Conservation news. DOI: https://doi.org/10.66709/news-321187Credits
