“One of the biggest threats to pangolins globally is habitat loss, but here in Singapore, road accidents are a larger immediate threat. We live in an urban city but we have a lot of wildlife all around us as well, so some encounters are inevitable.
I work as a veterinarian at Mandai Wildlife Group, which manages the Singapore Zoo. In this image, taken in May, I’m examining Berani, a big male Sunda pangolin (Manis javanica), at our facilities in the zoo. Berani — which means brave in Malay — was a wild pangolin who first came to us after a probable traffic accident in 2018. His femur was fractured and we decided to help him by surgically implanting a metal plate to support healing. It was a tricky job: to avoid his scales we had to approach the bone from the medial aspect — the belly side — of the leg.
He recovered from the surgery but developed a skin condition after some time, which is what my colleague and I are inspecting in this picture, with Berani under anaesthesia. The condition was a type of pemphigus, an autoimmune disorder for which he was eventually euthanized.