In a painstaking effort to combat the illegal wildlife trade, a Temminck’s pangolin named Stevie has been successfully rehabilitated and returned to the wild, where he is now reportedly thriving and breeding.
Stevie, a pup from the world’s most trafficked wild mammal species, was rescued in 2021 during a police sting operation in the streets of Johannesburg, South Africa.
Stevie was named after Steven Koen, a South Africa Police Service (Saps) K9 officer who played a vital role in the arrest of an “elusive” trafficker attempting to sell the young pup, reports BBC.
At the time of his rescue, Stevie was found in a car boot inside a cardboard box containing a cabbage leaf – an unsuitable food source for the insectivorous mammal.
Following his rescue, Stevie was placed under the care of specialist veterinarian Kelsey Skinner at the Johannesburg Wildlife Veterinary Hospital.
Upon arrival, he underwent fluid therapy for dehydration, blood tests, and received immune boosters. Although alert, the three-month-old pup was physically and psychologically compromised, frequently curling into a ball out of fear.
For six months, Skinner meticulously managed his care, bottle-feeding him cat milk formula until he accepted the artificial teat. To prepare him for the wild, Skinner walked him daily in his natural habitat, teaching him to forage for ants and termites by flipping rocks.
Once Stevie reached a weight of 6kg at nine months old – a size where his scales are hard enough to withstand predator attacks—he was transferred to the Manyoni Private Game Reserve in Zululand.
After five more months of monitoring by Donald Davies and his team, Stevie was fitted with telemetry trackers and released permanently at 14 months of age.
Conservation and breeding success
Recent data from Stevie’s trackers indicate that he has integrated into the wild population, regularly visiting female pangolins in their burrows. “It’s pretty guaranteed that he is now a father to a few pangolin pups,” Skinner noted.
Stevie’s success is mirrored by another rescued pangolin, Ditsi, who was saved from a trafficker near Vryburg in 2021.
Ditsi underwent a similar “soft release” process at Manyoni and was released in February 2023. Camera traps recently captured footage of Ditsi emerged from her burrow with a pup of her own.
The global trafficking crisis
Pangolins, often called scaly anteaters, are the world’s only truly scaly mammals and are heavily targeted for their scales, used in traditional medicine, and their meat, considered a delicacy in East Asia. Despite a total international trade ban passed in 2016, illegal trade persists.
Between 2000 and 2016, over one million pangolins are estimated to have been traded internationally. More recent seizures from 2016 to 2024 represent at least half a million more. As Asian species face extinction, Africa has become the primary source for this illicit market.
Future of protection
The African Pangolin Working Group (APWG), a South African non-profit, has facilitated the release of 85 pangolins since 2016.
In February 2025, the APWG established the “Pangalorium,” a purpose-built rehabilitation facility in the Lapalala Wilderness Reserve, with Kelsey Skinner as its resident veterinarian.
Nicci Wright, co-chair and executive director of the APWG, emphasised that rehabilitation is a critical component of conservation.
“You cannot conserve a species if there are no individuals left to conserve,” she said, highlighting the need for collaboration across African range states to dismantle trafficking networks.
