This Chinese Restaurant Can Get You Freshly-Slaughtered Meat From the Critically-Endangered Pangolin

Restaurant staff revealed that they regularly cheat their customers.
This Chinese Restaurant Can Get You Freshly-Slaughtered Meat From the Critically-Endangered Pangolin
A Malayan pangolin is seen out of its cage after being confiscated by the Department of Wildlife and Natural Parks in Kuala Lumpur, 08 August 2002. JIMIN LAI/AFP/Getty Images
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At first glance, nothing stands out about the Shennongge Medical Cuisine Hot Pot restaurant in Liuzhou, southern China, but you can get the meat of endangered animals here—if you know how to ask for it.

The restaurant provides an assortment of exotic dishes, among them stewed wattle-necked softshell turtle, chopped snake with spiced salt, the endangered giant salamander, and a strange but otherwise innocuous-sounding “sliced caterpillar fungus.”

The “fungus,” coming in at a whopping 1180 yuan (about $180) per order, is no fungus at all, but meat from the nearly-extinct Chinese pangolin.

Chinese pangolins are a relative of the anteater. The animal is about two feet long and is covered in armored scales. Only a few thousand are still alive in southern China and bordering states—a fraction of populations estimated in the 1970s. Pangolins are a prime target of poachers, who hunt the animals in their inaccessible and largely unregulated habitat.

By local belief, pangolin meat is good for blood circulation, depending on one’s body type.

Juliet Song
Juliet Song
Author
Juliet Song is an international correspondent exclusively covering China news for NTD. She primarily contributes to NTD's "China in Focus," covering U.S.-China relations, the Chinese regime's human rights abuses, and domestic unrest inside China.