The authors present a neutral gas shielding model including the distribution function of particles carrying the heat for ablation. In an ohmically heated tokamak, high energy electrons in the tail part of the Maxwellian with E approximately=6-8 Te contribute significantly to the ablation process at the pellet surface. A simple scaling for the pellet ablation rate is given which takes into account the Maxwellian electron energy distribution. The pellet penetration depth obtained with the model presented agrees well with the multigroup approximation for an energy distribution during ablation by Houlberg et al. (1988). Pellet ablation dominated by hot ions was obtained in a special NBI heated Heliotron E plasma with an electron temperature much lower than the ion temperature