Murder, He Wrote . . .

160 years ago, Fyodor Dostoevsky dealt deftly with moral dilemma and death in his novel Crime and Punishment. Today, an HKU biologist unpacks the moral and environmental aspects of illegal wildlife trade in Crime and Pangolins: A Mammalian Murder Mystery, presenting his research as a whodunnit.

The crime in this case is an illegal shipment of 88 dead pangolins that was intercepted by Hong Kong authorities in 2018: the mystery is where did the animals come from, why were they killed, where were they going and who were the kingpins behind it all?

The case piqued the interest of Professor Timothy Bonebrake, Director of the School of Biological Sciences and long-time researcher into pangolins and the illegal wildlife trade. So, why write it as a murder mystery rather than a straightforward research paper?

True crime

“As I was conducting my research on pangolins, it occurred to me that there were stories happening on the margins of the actual science that were not making it into our scientific papers. The idea of a book then came naturally from this realisation. Later on, I started seeing the chapters falling neatly in a pattern parallel to how some of my favourite true crime books and podcasts are told. I decided to lean into it!”

The story lends itself to the format – a crime, the evidence and legal aspects of the case as Professor Bonebrake details the lives and natural history of pangolins across Africa and Asia and how smuggling has brought them to endangerment. He asks not only how but why – what is their value within traditional Chinese medicine – and is that medicinal status justified or mythical? In short, do they have actual medicinal value?

Within the mystery framework too, he examines who the villains of the piece may be – doctors prescribing the medicine, the smugglers themselves or faceless gang bosses.

Separately, the book also sheds light on another mystery – the COVID-19 question which arose during the 2019/2020 pandemic when there was a lot of speculation that the virus might have originated from pangolins sold in Chinese wet markets.

“There is so much confusion among the public and also in the scientific literature about the relationship between pangolins and COVID-19,” said Professor Bonebrake. “I put a lot of effort into demystifying this relationship a bit – which is difficult because many questions remain.

“It’s important to point out that there is no causal link between pangolins and SARS-CoV-2, or COVID-19. However, there is good evidence now that pangolins in the trade are hosts of SARS-related coronaviruses and other rather nasty pathogens, including the Jingmen tick virus, which we know can infect humans.

“This knowledge carries significant public health implications because – regardless of the relationship between pangolins and SARS-CoV-2 – it means the indiscriminate exploitation of pangolins and other species does put us at risk of emerging infectious diseases.”

Pangolin awareness

The book raises as many questions as it answers, aiming in the process to bring pangolins and the crime surrounding them to public attention, and thereby facilitate change.

“We’re making rapid progress at both supply and demand ends of the wildlife trade – some really interesting work has come out in the past couple of years, focussing on communities who live with wildlife (including pangolins) and also the users of things like traditional medicine,” said Professor Bonebrake. “Once we better understand what motivates people to use animal products derived from trade and/or hunt them in the first place, then we can better implement policy and management solutions to conserve endangered species. Still work to go, but I see progress every day.”

He feels that one of the key messages is that we need to support the communities that live with and next to pangolin populations. “If sources of income can be provided to those communities, then it greatly diminishes the need to poach animals. We should also reduce our consumption of course (scales and meat both). But local and context-specific conservation interventions will be the most effective in protecting pangolins around the world.”

So, does this story have a happy ending? Not precisely – no one’s riding off into the sunset yet – but what conservationists and bio-scientists are doing is finding ways that people residing in areas where pangolins live can still make a living from these creatures without killing or trading them.

Asked what real success in this work would look like to him, Professor Bonebrake said: “We share Hong Kong with the magnificent but sadly critically endangered Chinese pangolin. They are very rare. Success to me would be a future where walking along a country park trail, I would see signs of their presence around me, knowing that conservation work effectively restored the population and contributed to the recovery of the species.”