The next day, as we returned to Cuc Phuong with the three surviving animals in the boot, Thai expanded on the pangolin’s plight. As a boy growing up near the national park in the late 1980s he used to see them all the time, he said, but none had been spotted in its 54,000 acres since 2006. After they had been hunted almost to extinction throughout northern Vietnam and southern China, they began to be imported in industrial quantities from Malaysia, Indonesia and other parts of south-east Asia, though international trade in pangolins was effectively banned in 2000. Now, in an alarming sign that south-east Asia’s pangolins are running out, scales are starting to arrive in large shipments from Africa.