A pangolin of a threatened species bore an offspring shortly after authorities rescued it from being killed for meat at a restaurant in southern Vietnam on Tuesday.

The five-kilogram pangolin was discovered to be encaged at a home-based restaurant in Dong Nai, a neighbor of Ho Chi Minh City, during a police raid.

The restaurant is a place for nhau, a Vietnamese cultural practice that involves carousing, or drinking and eating at social gatherings.

The mammal was estimated to fetch VND11 million (US$473) if it was sold. It gave birth to a baby in the cage around 30 minutes after being found by local authorities.

The animal belongs to the red-list Javan species of pangolin, found throughout Southeast Asia, including Laos, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, Myanmar and Vietnam.

The pangolin was kept in captivity along with 13 other threatened animals that were alive, amongst which were a chevrotain and an Asian palm civet – species native to South and Southeast Asia.

But police officers arrived too late to prevent a rare snake from being slaughtered for a meal at the restaurant.

A local man let all the above animals stay in the restaurant and received money from the establishment whenever each of them was killed upon customers’ request, the restaurant manager said.

Police booked the restaurant and moved the animals to the wildlife rescue area of an ecotourism resort in Dong Nai Province for care before they are released to their natural habitat.

In Vietnam pangolins are considered highly vulnerable to extinction, according to Save Vietnam’s Wildlife, a not-for-profit acting for wildlife’s sake, though trafficking the species remains lucrative due to perceived medicinal properties.

Two seizures of a large number of live pangolins have been reported in Vietnam so far this year.

On June 13, 74 endangered pangolins, weighing a combined 339 kilograms, were found in a truck traveling through the north of the country.

In late January, 114 pangolins were impounded after authorities caught traffickers moving the animals by boat in Ca Mau, Vietnam’s southernmost province.

Like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter to get the latest news about Vietnam!