Welcome back to the podcast, bribe, swindle, or steel.

I'm Alexandra Rogge, and my guest today is Catherine Abernathy.

Kate is a natural sciences professor at the University of Sterling in Scotland.

She's led an expansive study together with

Gabonese researchers and industry partners into the trafficking of the now endangered pangolin

in Africa. So Kate, thank you for joining me.

Pleasure. I'm going to give listeners a heads up that you are calling in from Liberville

in Gabon and you have a lot of chickens near your office.

So we're going to hear them in the background and just, you know, count that for atmosphere.

Why don't we start with a bit of a pangolin primer, if you could?

They look, to me, a bit like a giant garden grub, not a very sympathetic animal until you hear their story, kind of docile, scaly creatures.

Can you tell us about them as an animal, as a mammal, and about their habitat?

Pangolins are found in African and Asian tropics.

There are eight species, four in Africa and foreign Asia.

And they're all insectivores.

They're all very closely linked. I think our European and American equivalents would be

hedgehogs and armadillos, ground-living creatures which eat ants and termites. They roll into a

ball when they're frightened. They have no real

defenses. They've got large claws for digging into the ground, breaking open ant hills and

termite mounds, but they don't have big teeth. They don't have any poison. You can pretty much

just pick them up if you find them. So if someone wants to hunt them, then they're in trouble.

And is the understanding that they have no defenses because they just haven't had any natural

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