Baby orangutans found in Indian forest spark trafficking inquiry

Five baby orangutans have been found in a forest in India's eastern state of Odisha, far from their natural habitat, prompting an investigation into how they got there.

Photographs and videos widely shared online show the young apes sitting together on the forest floor and eating bananas, thousands of kilometres from the tropical rainforests where they belong.

Orangutans are not native to India. The critically endangered apes are found in the wild only in Indonesia and Malaysia.

Odisha's forest minister has said investigators are examining whether the animals were trafficked into the country by an international smuggling network and abandoned near a highway.

The orangutans were rescued early on Tuesday in Balasore district after local people spotted them and alerted forest officials.

They were given first aid before being taken to Nandankanan Zoological Park in the state capital, Bhubaneswar, where they are in quarantine and being monitored.

Balasore District Forest Officer Pratik Prakash Indalkar told the BBC that the animals could not have reached Odisha naturally and may have been transported there by road.

"The five animals were found in Ranakata, a proposed reserve forest in Bhogarai block, near the West Bengal border," he said.

"The area is covered mainly by casuarina trees and is not a dense forest. It is also close to a state highway."

The Odisha government has also reportedly asked India's Wildlife Crime Control Bureau to investigate. Police, forest officials and a special task force are involved in the inquiry.

Forest officials believe the orangutans had been in the area for only two or three days.

A search of the forest found no other orangutans or clues as to how the animals got there, Indalkar said.

Officials described them to the BBC as infants, although some local reports suggest they are between one and two years old.

Their young age makes their discovery particularly concerning, wildlife expert Biswajit Mohanty said.

Young orangutans typically remain with their mothers for several years, learning the skills they need to survive independently. Females also reproduce slowly, usually giving birth only once every eight years.

The discovery of five young orangutans together, thousands of kilometres from their natural habitat and with no adult animals nearby, has therefore raised concerns of how they came to be in Odisha.

There are three known living species of orangutan - Bornean, Sumatran and Tapanuli - all of which are classified as critically endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, or IUCN.

Over the years, their numbers have declined sharply because of deforestation, habitat loss and hunting.

International commercial trade in orangutans is prohibited under Cites - the global agreement governing trade in endangered wildlife. They are also protected under Indian wildlife laws.

Despite this, orangutans continue to be trafficked for sale as exotic pets and to private collectors.

This is not the first time young orangutans have been found in India.

In 2022, two baby orangutans were found abandoned at a checkpoint near the border between the states of Assam and Mizoram. Officials suspected they had been brought into India through neighbouring Myanmar.

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