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.