09/30/2026
Photos and words by iLCP Senior Fellow Marcus Westberg (Photographer & Storyteller) / If you donāt pity the plight of the pangolin, compassion canāt be your strong suit. Until humans got involved, pangolins were pretty much perfectly evolved to cope with danger in the most relaxed way possible: curling up into armoured little balls. (And, in some cases, not so little.) Sooner or later, most predators just leave them alone. They only eat ants and termites, so thereās no conflict with people on account of competition for crops, damage to buildings or killed livestock. In fact, since they are nocturnal and exceedingly shy, coming into any kind of contact with them generally requires a fair bit of effort.
Unfortunately, some humans developed a penchant for their meat, while others decided that their scales were a hitherto unknown cure for rheumatism, asthma, deafness, and a whole host of other ailments. In the real world, of course, the scales are made from keratin, exactly the same as your fingernails, and they are completely free of any medical properties whatsoever. Not that it seems to matter: a combination of greed, superstition, and poverty has wreaked havoc on both Africaās and Asiaās pangolins, as it has on so many other species. And that perfectly evolved defence is of very little use when the predators are people: those armoured balls are very easy to scoop up and put in a sack.
Luckily, there are people fighting this at every level, from anti-poaching to rehabilitation and release. Since the latter has received much less attention than the former, and is a more hopeful story besides, I made a pitch reflecting that to Nat Geo a little less than a year ago, and this is the result. It was such a privilege to immerse myself in the world of the Tikki Hywood Foundation in Zimbabwe and Cameroon, especially since I was able to do so alongside my very good friend Henry Wismayer, whose words have accompanied many of my photos for almost a decade. As always, it is an incredible privilege to be invited to share such intimate and sensitive spaces, and my respect for those who have decided to dedicate themselves to causes like this one knows no bounds.
