Continued availability and sale of pangolins in a major urban bushmeat market in Cameroon despite national bans and the COVID-19 outbreak

Abstract

First paragraph: Bushmeat (or ‘wild meat’, defined as the meat of wild animals) is a major source of protein for rural people across sub-Saharan Africa (Ingram et al., 2021), yet some species suffer unsustainable levels of exploitation often to meet the demands of increasing urban populations (Coad et al., 2019; Wilkie et al., 2016). As in the rest of Central Africa, Cameroon has a long history of bushmeat consumption and trade (Bahuchet & Ioveva, 1999; Randolph, 2016). Pangolins (Family: Manidae) have been one of the many groups of species exploited as they are highly valued for food and, in some countries, used as traditional remedies (Soewu et al., 2020). Pangolin meat is favoured for its taste and it remains commonly offered for sale in Cameroonian markets and restaurants (Ingram et al., 2018; Nguyen et al., 2021). Furthermore, Cameroon has become one of the major export countries for the illegal trade in pangolin scales from Africa to Asia (Ingram et al., 2019a), to supply the market for Asian traditional medicines, for example in traditional Chinese medicine (Wang et al., 2020). All African pangolin species are now considered to have declining population trends (Ingram et al., 2019b; Nixon et al., 2019; Pietersen et al., 2019a, 2019b).