The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has recently proposed listing seven species of pangolins, the most trafficked mammals on the planet, under the Endangered Species Act. If finalized, an ESA listing would prohibit the import and sale of pangolins and their parts in the U.S., except for scientific or conservation purposes. It would also open up potential funding for antitrafficking and habitat-conservation efforts, which these mammals desperately need. “Pangolins are on the razor’s edge of extinction, and we need to completely shut down any U.S. market for their scales,” Sarah Uhlemann, international program director at the Center for Biological Diversity (CBD), said in a press release. “There’s no good reason for anybody to ingest any part of a pangolin.” The seven pangolin species proposed to be listed as endangered include all four Asian pangolin species: the critically endangered Chinese (Manis pentadactyla), Sunda (Manis javanica) and Philippine pangolins (Manis culionensis), and the endangered Indian pangolin (Manis crassicaudata); as well as three African species: the endangered white-bellied (Phataginus tricuspis) and giant pangolins (Smutsia gigantea), and the black-bellied pangolin (Phataginus tetradactyla), considered vulnerable on the IUCN Red List. The fourth African species, Temminck’s pangolin (Smutsia temminckii), also called the ground pangolin, is already listed as endangered under the U.S. Endangered Species Act. The USFWS proposal to list the remaining seven species under the ESA comes in response to a 2015 petition and a 2020 legal agreement between the federal agency and various conservation NGOs and animal welfare organizations to determine if a listing…This article was originally published on Mongabay