The animal is the cargo

Updated September 2026

Trade is not the same as a pet listing

A CITES appendix is a trade-treaty fact. A US state ban can exist because a released pet would harm a native species. Those pages stay on this site because the pet trade sometimes overlaps the catalog. This page is the other overlap: poaching and trafficking that empty a wild population whether or not anyone ever tried to keep the animal in a flat.

The Chinese pangolin is Critically Endangered on the category this catalog displays. Scales and meat are the cargo people actually move. We will not publish a seizure tonnage we cannot source, and we will not tell you how to buy one. If you came here from a “can I keep a pangolin” search, the honest sentence is no — and the wild fact is the one that belongs on this domain.

How to read trade on a dossier

Look for a CITES mention, a horn or scale or shell, and a range that crosses a border. Horn and ivory stories are easy to flatten into a single villain. The catalog keeps the animal: photograph, category, country pin if we have one. Official trade listings live on the CITES checklist. Official extinction risk lives on the Red List. This site is the photograph and the original dossier between them.

What we will not do

We will not write a care sheet. We will not rank which trafficked animal is more valuable. We are not a charity and we do not take donations. If you want the legality layer for animals people actually try to keep, use the US checker and then your county. If you want the wild animal, stay in the catalog.