Economies of scale

In Competition No. 3171, a challenge suggested by a kind reader, you were invited to submit a requiem in verse for the pangolin.

One competitor pointed out that my request for a requiem seemed somewhat premature given that pangolins are still very much with us. Well, for the moment they are. But these shy, solitary, nocturnal creatures (which are more closely related to dogs and bears than to the armadillos they resemble) are being hunted down for their scales and meat and are now critically endangered. What is more, pangolins constitute their own taxonomic order, so if they disappear there’ll be nothing like them left on the planet.

You rose to the occasion well, and in a terrifically varied entry John Priestland’s riff on Noël Coward (‘Don’t put your pangolin in your pan, Mrs Worthington…’), Nick MacKinnon’s Kipling-inspired entry, Max Ross’s clever reworking of Burns’s ‘To a Mouse’ and Janey Wilks’s haiku all warrant an honourable mention.

The winners are printed below and their authors pocket £30 apiece.

Black marketeers are wrangling the pangolin,The very last to cutely pad the Earth,A beast now so atypical it’s very nearly mythicalWhose rarity will only boost its worth.  Bushmeat gourmets are dismantling the pangolin,Dissecting and divesting it of scales.Divvied out in pricey portions (that’s to maximise extortions)They’re dismayed that it’s the last — no future sales.  Chinese quacks are busy mangling the pangolin,Concocting ancient nostrums against age,Mixing flakes of scaly anteater with oil of asp and saltpetreAs propounded by a Tang dynastic sage.  By the merest thread it’s dangling, the pangolin,A creature so delightful and distinctThat we’ll all, our eyes a-brimming, be its humble praises singingWhen we make it, through complacency, extinct.Adrian Fry

Pray for the pangolin soul. Haunted by hunters, by bush-tucker quacks, they never had time to reflect or relax: dark eyes saw only the scales on their backs, and the tongues that roll or unroll.