Pangolins are the world's most trafficked mammals. Understanding the welfare implications of trafficking and the challenges of rehabilitation shapes conservation and welfare responses.
Trafficking causes intense suffering for pangolins at every stage: capture, packing into bags and crates with multiple individuals, days of transport without food or water, handling at markets, and the slaughter process. Pangolins respond to stress by curling into a ball — a defensive posture that, while adaptive in the wild, makes them easy to handle and pack, facilitating trafficking. Rehabilitation is extremely challenging — pangolins in captivity almost uniformly refuse to eat, and replicating their specialised ant diet at scale is near-impossible. The most welfare-positive intervention is preventing trafficking at source through law enforcement and demand reduction.