Anteaters’ scales contain just keratin, the same substance found in fingernail, a conservationist said.
“It’s like eating your own fingernail,” said Danau Girang Field Centre director Dr Benoit Goossens, dispelling the belief that the scales have medicinal values.
The research centre for the conservation of tropical ecosystems is managed by the Sabah Wildlife Department and Cardiff University.
His comments came about following last Thursday’s discovery of a factory in an industrial park in Sepanggar near here that processed anteaters’ meat and scales. Live and processed pangolins (or scaly anteaters) worth about RM8.5mil were found in the factory by police and wildlife investigators.
The haul included 61 live pangolins, 361kg of pangolin scales, 572 frozen pangolins and three containers filled with 1,860 boxes of frozen pangolins. The demand for pangolin scales was mainly due to a misplaced belief that it is good for health, Dr Goossens said.
Despite efforts to create public awareness about the need to conserve the gentle creatures, he said it remained one of the most trafficked protected species not only in Sabah but worldwide.
Dr Goossens said he believed that most of the pangolins recovered were sourced from the Borneo region and not just Sabah. He believed the number of pangolins left in Sabah’s wild had dwindled “although it is very hard to conduct a census on their number”.
The factory raided was believed to have been in operation for the last seven years. The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species has banned the trade of all eight species of pangolins.
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