This is a (lightly edited) guest post is of a presentation by my friend and colleague Martin Walsh*, given at a Lunchtime Seminar at Wolfson College, University of Cambridge earlier this week that incorporates some of the images and text from a 10 January 2026 presentation to the Fundación de Psicología Analítica Junguiana (FPAJ), Córdoba, Argentina.
Both presentations concern Martin’s consideration of why we need to ‘think with pangolins’, to ‘(de)mythologise’ them and other animals and how animal symbolism has and might be analysed, including ‘the role of animals in ritual and myth and how they’re mythologised.’
Yesterday, Saturday 21st of February, was World Pangolin Day and all week we’re celebrating pangolins and the work being done to conserve them. A wide variety of people and disciplines are involved in pangolin conservation, reflecting the fact that they’re the world’s most trafficked wild mammals, sold for their meat and for traditional medicines made especially from their scales.
Pangolins are remarkable scale-covered mammals, specialised for feeding on ants and termites. They’re primarily nocturnal and so rarely encountered; I’ve only ever seen them in captivity or being released into the wild.
There are eight recognised species, found in the forests and savannas of tropical Africa and Asia. All of them are at risk from human exploitation, as well as from habitat loss and the various consequences of climate change.
The easternmost Asian species are classified by the IUCN as ‘critically endangered’. The species I’m most familiar with and will refer to most is Temminck’s pangolin, sometimes called the ground or Cape pangolin. It’s currently classed as ‘vulnerable’.
Today I’m going to zoom in on just one aspect of that trade: the kinds of thinking about pangolins that have made their body parts so desirable. Hence my starting question: how do myths about pangolins contribute to their extirpation, and how might understanding these ideas be used to improve their conservation?
As you’ll see, I’m using ‘myth’ in both its cosmological and colloquial senses, to save me from having to introduce even more loaded terms like ‘superstition’ and ‘false belief’.
I’m going to begin with an example from my own research. This includes unpublished field notes written by 20 collaborators – without their help, I wouldn’t be talking to you today. My research was carried out over several periods in southwest and south-central Tanzania, where I worked among various Bantu-speaking peoples in the catchment of the Great Ruaha River, just south of Ruaha National Park.
Encounters with pangolins in this region were traditionally treated as auspicious events that set in motion a ritual process. The Sangu, eponymous inhabitants of the Usangu Plains, describe a sequence that I’ve summarised schematically on the slide.
The process begins when a pangolin is said to be sent down to earth by the ancestors and to choose a particular person to latch onto and doggedly follow home, ignoring other people and even crowds along the way.
Once home, the chief is informed and his ritual specialist is called. The pangolin and the person it’s chosen are confined indoors for several days, sometimes longer. There they’re joined by the parents of twins, dancing together day and night, and singing the songs that are sung during the rites of twin birth.
The pangolin is said to dance as well, and its behaviour is interpreted. It’s then asked to choose between objects placed before it, and this too is read as a sign. Once a prediction for the future has been made, the period of confinement ends.
The rites end at a riverbank or similar place, where the pangolin is buried in a sitting position, just like chiefs and the parents of twins. This is also how the person followed by the pangolin will one day be buried.
It’s said that the pangolin is allowed to escape, though some claim that it is killed, a practice reported from certain communities downstream, where variants of the ritual are performed.
When I first wrote about the pangolin ritual, I didn’t analyse it in this way. That may have been just as well, because my retelling of the Sangu narrative was taken up as an interesting account of cultural ideas and practices relating to pangolins—of a kind that might be incorporated into participatory conservation initiatives.
Traditions of respect for pangolins, and taboos reinforcing that respect, have been of particular interest in this regard.
One well-known example comes from Zimbabwe. In some areas, local chiefs have been supported by the government to revive and adapt traditional protections for pangolins.
These are combined with modern sanctions and institutions in order to combat poaching. It’s been suggested that such reinventions of tradition might be applied more widely, and there are now scattered examples of analogous initiatives in different settings, albeit not on the same scale.
Traditional Chinese Medicine—or TCM—is a practice of major importance in Vietnam as well as different parts of the Chinese world.
Like much of TCM, the use of pangolins belongs to a long textual tradition that was codified several centuries ago. In this tradition, pangolin scales and medicines prepared from them are used primarily to unblock the channels, or meridians, in the body, and so to treat a variety of physical complaints.
The underlying idea, which can also be traced in folklore and is reflected in the pangolin’s Chinese name, chuānshānjiǎ, often translated as ‘mountain-piercer’, is that Chinese pangolins are highly efficient burrowers. Their ability to tunnel and break through obstacles is what invests their scales and other body parts with the putative power to clear blockages of different kinds in the human body. This association is extended to other species, and thus to all the scales imported for use in TCM.
Despite all the differences, the parallels between this example and the Tanzanian cases are clear. An observation or perception of pangolin behaviour has been translated, through the logic of connection and part–whole representation, into prescriptions for the use of the same qualities in human medicine. There is, of course, much more to pangolin trafficking, TCM, and consumer demand than this account suggests, but analogical reasoning of this kind is one of the elements that underpins it.
The use of pangolin scales and other body parts as magical charms and medicines takes this a step further. Parts of the animal come to stand for the whole, and are therefore understood to transmit the same, or related, qualities. In the case of whitlow, the implied logic seems to be that an infection a pangolin can cause can also be undone by it. The identification between animal and disease is so close that the latter is named after the former.
There’s nothing particularly unusual in this connection-based way of thinking, nor in the metaphorical leaps involved in reading pangolin behaviour in the staged arena of ritual and divinatory performance.
We’re all susceptible to thinking in these ways, and sometimes choose to. The underlying logics have long been subjects for analysis—at one time by anthropologists, and more recently by experimental psychologists and cognitive scientists.
We may struggle to explain some ideas about animals—perhaps because they’re derived from inherited traditions whose origins we can no longer recover.
It’s important to add that tackling this problem should not be done in a way that openly demonises or ridicules existing ideas and practices.
There’s much to be gained, as many pangolin conservationists are already aware, by emphasising and building on their positive aspects. This need not be limited to reviving or promoting traditional injunctions and other pangolin-friendly practices.
Another possibility is to foster a wider appreciation of local environmental knowledge and practice, which are so often ignored or undervalued by educators—not to mention many researchers and practitioners.
In working with research collaborators in the Great Ruaha valley and beyond, I’ve found it very easy to identify people who are more than willing to document their own and their communities’ environmental knowledge and practices.
An increasing interest in these subjects is also evident in local universities and, in different forms, on social media—often independently of external prompting or support. Harnessing such enthusiasm should not be difficult, and some of the most promising initiatives are already doing so.
And finally, what about the Sangu narrative that I began with, and others like it? The Sangu pangolin ritual was first mentioned in writing by the priest-turned-researcher who preceded me in the field, Jacques Bilodeau. His thesis on the Sangu language was accompanied by a series of marvellous tales, including one that features a pangolin.
Stories of this kind can be retold in many ways for educational purposes, and it wouldn’t be difficult to incorporate such material into lessons—not only about conservation, which some programmes are already doing, but about scientific thinking more generally.
The same, no doubt, applies across much of the pangolins’ range.
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