L.A. Zoo’s Newest Addition Isn’t Your Average Pangolin

It’s not unusual for the Los Angeles Zoo to get calls about animals confiscated at LAX. There’s the occasional smuggled monkey, the reptile without proper papers. Then there was the call last week.

A U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service inspector had seized a pangolin carried in by tourists returning from Africa. Was the zoo interested?

A rare mammal found in Africa and Asia, the pangolin is essentially a scaly anteater that feeds on ants and termites filched from the earth with its elongated nails and sticky tongue. “It looks like an artichoke,” said L.A. Zoo keeper Katherine Jaynes, “especially when it rolls up into a ball to protect itself.”

Michael Dee, the general curator of the zoo, was definitely interested.

“There are a few animals I thought I would never see alive and the pangolin is one of them,” said Dee, who has traveled the globe viewing most of the rest. He saw his first pangolin in the early 1990s when the zoo took one in and kept it until its death several years later.

Then Jan. 11, a Fish and Wildlife staffer was en route to the zoo with the pangolin. Zoo staffers had discussed the pros and cons of accepting the unusual animal.

“We thought we could give it a good shot,” Dee said.

The pangolin these days has to avoid hunters who, depending on their culture, believe it is an aphrodisiac or can cure skin diseases. This one, it seems, was trying to outrun villagers in the Republic of Congo when it was captured.

When the animal arrived at the zoo, there was another surprise: It was no wider than a man’s palm.

“Holy smokes, this thing is a baby,” Dee recalled thinking. Zoo staffers moved the pangolin to the nursery and scrambled to figure out how to nurture the 316-gram creature -- a mere 11 ounces -- that has been bestowed its own order in the biological classification system.

The pangolin is probably between 1 and 3 months old. Zoo officials are less certain about its gender. “We don’t have another one to compare it to,” said Jaynes, its primary keeper.

The pangolin spends its days in an incubator. It sleeps burrowed in fluffy white towels, next to a stuffed alligator toy. “We wanted to find something that looked like its mother,” said Jaynes.

The animal, which is alone in the nursery, is under a 30-day quarantine, common for any new animal.

Before the keeper and a visitor step into the nursery, they put on polyethylene coveralls, plastic boot sheaths, a hair cover, surgical mask and gloves. Once inside, Jaynes warms kitten formula in a tiny bottle.

Only a few weeks ago the pangolin was scampering behind its mother as she vaulted up a tree to escape hunters. The mother escaped, but the men scooped up the baby and returned to the village of Mayeye. The tiny pangolin wouldn’t make much of a meal, so they sold it to visitors from Sherman Oaks.

“They wanted $5, but my husband said three,” said Paulina Moussiesse, 29. She was with her husband, Bruno, who was born in the Republic of Congo, their sons, and her mother on a visit to her in-laws in the village.

They began caring for the animal. “To take him back to the jungle would be to leave him to die,” she said.

Moussiesse took the tiny, dirt-covered pangolin and scrubbed it with a toothbrush. To feed it, she soaked a cotton ball with milk, which the creature sucked ravenously.

“He was so skinny and then he ate so much he had a big belly, so we called him Belly in Russian,” said Moussiesse, who was born in Russia and raised in Ukraine.

A couple of days later, Moussiesse pored over regulations for bringing an exotic animal into the United States. It didn’t look promising. She tried to get friends in the city of Pointe-Noire to take the pangolin as a pet. “Nobody wanted him because they thought he looked ugly,” she said.

With only two days before their Jan. 9 return flight, the family had the animal checked by a veterinarian. A basket weaver in her husband’s village made a covered container for the animal’s trip.

Moussiesse had no trouble getting on the flight from Pointe-Noire to Paris. But a security official at the gate for the Paris-to-LAX flight opened the basket and screamed. Still, the pangolin was allowed to board.

At Los Angeles International Airport, Moussiesse checked the box on her declaration saying she was carrying a live animal and hoped for the best. They got as far as the X-ray machine.

“I said, ‘No, I have my pet in there,’ ” she recalled. “They said, ‘What kind of pet?’ They were screaming and shouting, and then they were laughing.”

Fish and Wildlife inspector Larry Strong got the call.

“I knew immediately what it was,” Strong said. Usually, he saw illegally traded pangolin parts and products -- including boots made of pangolin. In his 20 years at Fish and Wildlife, he said, “we’ve never come across a live one.”

Animals protected by the international treaty on animal trade, including pangolins, cannot enter the U.S. without a special permit.

Moussiesse signed a form giving up the animal. “I said, ‘Do you know where he’s going?’ and he said, ‘He will be adopted,’ ” she recalled. “I said, ‘Why can’t we adopt him?’ ”

The inspector said the animal would go to an organization that could care for it. She asked if they could find out where.

“He said, ‘You can’t get any information,’ ” she recalled. “My kids were crying and I was crying and he said, ‘OK, here’s my supervisor’s number. You can call him.’ ”

At the Fish and Wildlife office in Torrance, Strong and his colleagues tried, unsuccessfully, to get the animal to drink water. By the time zookeeper Jaynes got the pangolin, it had not eaten for two days.

Now it gets seven feedings a day, recorded on a chart in the nursery. Instead of Moussiesse’s makeshift cotton ball, the animal suckles formula from a special nipple from Australia used for kangaroos.

On a recent day, the animal was climbing around its incubator, anticipating an 11 a.m. feeding.

Jaynes gently lifted the animal out and put it in a baby blanket. Outside the nursery windows, zoo visitors pointed cameras.

The baby looks like a dark-eyed furry-headed prairie dog -- albeit one with little greenish scales that cover its back and run down its long prehensile tail. Its soft pink underside reveals barely a hint of its sex. Another of his minders, Jaynes said, is guessing male.

Its nose quivered as it looked around and grasped at Jaynes’ hands with long, curved black nails. The pangolin suckled hungrily at the bottle, periodically closing its eyes to rest.

Jaynes, who raised the zoo’s recent brood of baby chimps, sat in the nursery’s rocking chair and cuddled the pangolin. “In one sense it’s a very easy baby,” she said.

As of Tuesday, the pangolin was tipping the scales at about 12 ounces and measured 16 inches from nose to tail. Half of that is tail. At maturity, he’ll weigh up to 5 pounds and measure up to 3 feet.

The zoo has yet to name him. “One, we want to make sure we have the right sex,” Dee said. “And No. 2, we want to keep it alive.”

There are seven types of pangolins, and this one appears to be a small-scaled tree pangolin. But, Dee said, “for most people, a pangolin is a pangolin is a pangolin.”

Not for its rescuers. Paulina Moussiesse called the Fish and Wildlife supervisor late last week. With her younger son in tow Saturday, she headed straight for the zoo nursery, where the pangolin can be viewed by the public.

She was introduced to Jaynes, who peppered the pangolin’s finder with questions about the animal. Through the nursery window, Jaynes presented the now-pampered pangolin.

Moussiesse marveled at the incubator and humidity-controlled nursery. “He lives better than we do!” she said.