>>58002401
>>58002536
so pretty much just 1:1 with the IRL animals they're based on

but I'd imagine sandshrews/sandslashes would fare quite a lot better than IRL pangolins by merit of being more wildly distributed around the world, particularly in countries with actual wildlife protection laws such as japan, america, france, and britain
granted this is assuming that we're putting pokemon into the IRL areas that the ingame locations you can find them in are based on, but to be fair some mons/evolutionary lines are based on multiple IRL animals and the sandshrew line is based on multiple insectivorous animals that happen to have durable skin/scales and sharp claws due to ecological adaptations for the same niche

>>57959283
behold, a bunch of identical animals