Opinion

The elusive animal in the spotlight amid the coronavirus crisis

Amy Yee is a journalist and former Financial Times correspondent.

About two years ago in northern Uganda, I watched anxiously as an endangered pangolin was released into a protected forest. Wildlife authorities and conservationists had rescued the scaly mammal from poachers. The small, gentle creature fell off the tree he was trying to climb and weakly crawled into the underbrush. Pangolins tend to die in captivity so release into the wild was his best option for survival. But the odds were stacked against him, in many ways.