Word: jemas
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...just after dawn in the hills of South Sumatra, but Jema'ah is hard at work. Jema'ah, 39, normally feeds his family of four by tramping from village to village buying vegetables from farmers and then reselling them to dealers, a practice that nets him about $40 in a good month. Today, if he's lucky, he will earn twice that in a few hours. "Pangolin are usually asleep in their nests at this time of day," he says, squatting down in front of a rabbit-hole-sized opening in a low embankment. After piling dried leaves and twigs...
...with organs that purportedly have curative powers. They include the rapidly vanishing tiger and the unfortunate pangolin. According to the dictionary, pangolin scales can be "used to cure tumefaction [swelling], promote blood circulation and help breast-feeding mothers produce milk." If he wanted a more up-to-date answer, Jema'ah could also have asked Wei Hong, a Guangdong native in his mid-30s who developed a taste for pangolin meat when his father bought some 20 years ago in the hope of curing a skin disease. With the meat now selling at an exorbitant $100 a kilogram...
...forests once teemed with pangolin. But the reproductive capacity of the slow-moving mammal is no match for Chinese appetites, and pangolins have been all but eradicated on the mainland. Now gourmets, traditional medicine practitioners and businessmen looking to show off their wealth rely on the likes of Jema'ah. But even in distant Sumatran forests, the pangolin is growing harder to find. "I used to catch big ones" of up to 20 kilograms, Jema'ah says. "But the biggest I catch these days are eight kilos...
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