World Pangolin Day Is This Saturday. Your Child Has No Idea What a Pangolin Is.

Every third Saturday of February, conservationists and wildlife organisations around the world mark World Pangolin Day. This year it’s February 21 — three days away. There will be posts. There will be campaigns. There will be organisations asking for donations.

And most Nigerian children, if you asked them right now, could not tell you what a pangolin looks like.

I don’t think that’s surprising. I think we’ve quietly decided that pangolin awareness is adult work — something for zoologists and NGOs, something that belongs in academic papers and fundraising appeals. The animals disappearing from Nigerian forests will be mourned by experts and remembered in conservation reports. Not by children. Not in picture books.

That feels wrong to me, and I’ve been trying to work out why.

They live here

Nigeria has three pangolin species — white-bellied, black-bellied, and giant ground pangolin. They live across the South-South and South-East, through Cross River, Ondo, Edo, Delta State. Most Nigerians have never seen one. The animals are nocturnal and deeply solitary; they move through the forest at night and almost never appear in the open.

They are also, according to CITES, the most trafficked wild mammal on earth. More than a million are estimated to have been taken from the wild over the past decade. Their scales — keratin, same material as your fingernails — are ground into powder and sold across Asia as medicine, with no proven therapeutic value whatsoever.

A 2025 study in Nature Ecology & Evolution by Charles Emogor — a conservation scientist from the Pangolin Protection Network right here in Calabar — found something that reframes the whole story. Emogor and his colleagues interviewed 809 hunters and meat vendors across 33 communities in southeast Nigeria. They expected the international scale trade to be the main driver. What they found was different. Ninety-seven percent of pangolins in the region are caught during ordinary hunting trips, not targeted. Ninety-eight percent are caught for their meat, not their scales. Seventy-one percent are eaten by the hunters’ own households. Nearly seventy percent of the scales are thrown away, because there’s almost no local market for them and meat fetches three to four times the price.

This is not a trafficking problem that happens somewhere else and passes through Nigeria. It’s a food security problem. An awareness problem. It’s happening in communities, which means it can only change in communities — and communities start with what children know.

The animal itself

The pangolin is strange-looking enough that children immediately want to know more about it. Small head, long armoured body, scales overlapping like roofing tiles, a nose shaped like a question mark. It doesn’t look like it should work as an animal.

But it does, brilliantly. When threatened, a pangolin rolls into a ball so tightly interlocked that lions give up on it. Leopards walk away. Evolution handed the pangolin a perfect defence — which is also, tragically, why it’s so easy to poach. It curls up and waits. You just pick it up.

It has no teeth. Instead it has a tongue rooted deep in its chest cavity, nearly as long as its body, that reaches into termite mounds and pulls out insects by the thousand. It swallows small stones to grind the food in its stomach. Seventy million insects a year, roughly, for one pangolin. Those termite mounds it breaks open — that’s aeration. That’s soil health. That’s the forest.

A child who learns this at age seven doesn’t become an adult who is indifferent when pangolins disappear. That’s not sentiment — it’s just how caring about things works.

Pala

When we made Pangolin’s Spiky Scales, the question we kept coming back to was what makes a child feel for an animal they’ve never seen.

The answer we kept arriving at was: show them an animal that feels the way they sometimes feel.

Pala feels ordinary. Not fast, not fierce, not obviously impressive. Other animals around him have more obvious gifts. And then danger comes, and what saves the day is exactly the thing Pala thought was unremarkable about himself — his scales, his patience, his particular kind of courage.

Every classroom has children who feel like Pala. The book is for them as much as it’s for the pangolin.

Saturday

World Pangolin Day comes and goes. The posts run, the campaigns close, the conservationists move on to the next cycle.

What stays is what children carry. A child who knows what a pangolin is — who knows its name, its armour, what it eats, what it does for the forest, what kind of courage it has — that child is doing conservation work just by growing up.

Pangolin’s Spiky Scales is available now at ayikwa.com