World Pangolin Day and Pangolins.org
World Pangolin Day was founded in 2012 by Rhishja Cota. This special day is an opportunity for pangolin enthusiasts to join together in raising awareness about these unique mammals – and their plight. Pangolins are unfortunately one of the most frequently encountered mammals in the illegal wildlife trade.
From 2012 through 2021, Rhishja managed the World Pangolin Day website, Facebook page, and Twitter feed. After ten years, she felt that World Pangolin Day would benefit from new leadership, so she passed the torch to Save Pangolins in January 2022.
Pangolins.org contains general pangolin information and a collection of pangolin trafficking incidents curated from the public domain from October 2011 through June 2014.
Rhishja is currently a consultant with a US-based IT firm. She worked as a consultant with USAID Wildlife Asia from May 2017 until June 2021, where she authored the Pangolin Species Identification Guide and was a key organizer of the first-of-its-kind pangolin care workshop in Thailand. Rhishja is the founder of the nonprofit Annamiticus and she hosted the Behind the Schemes podcast from 2012 – 2017. In 2011, she wrote and published the book Murder, Myths & Medicine. Rhishja has been researching and writing about wildlife trafficking since 2009.
Rhishja has journeyed to the streets of Hanoi to research the illegal wildlife trade, to the rainforests of Sumatra and Java to document the world’s rarest rhinos, and trekked with wildlife protection rangers in Cambodia. At CITES meetings, she advocates in favor of protecting endangered species from economic exploitation and scrutinizes the abuse of trade loopholes.
Her work has been referenced by diverse sources, including The Revelator (“What Does the World Need to Understand About Wildlife Trafficking?“) and (“The Biggest Issues for Wildlife and Endangered Species in 2019“), Mongabay (“Pity the pangolin: little-known most common victim of wildlife trade“) The New York Times, Antique Week, and Consultancy Africa Intelligence. She has been interviewed on Mongabay (“Belief and butchery: how lies and organized crime are pushing rhinos to extinction“), “The Wildlife” radio talk show, and BBC World Business Report.
Rhishja is a Stanford Certified Project Manager (Stanford Center for Professional Development, Stanford University) and received her BA degree in Government from California State University, Sacramento.