Chennai: A day after actor Vikram’s reel with a Lar gibbon went viral, triggering backlash, a pair of Lar gibbons found at industrialist C K Ranganathan’s farmhouse in Injambakkam has been sent back to its original owner, S K Kesavanathan of Perundurai in Erode district.Forest officials confirmed the presence of the exotic primates at the Perundurai farm and said they would now be confiscated. Erode district forest officer Kumili Appala Naidu told TOI that the action followed a message from the Chennai wildlife warden directing officials to inspect Kesavanathan’s premises.Acting on this, a forest department team visited the Perundurai farmhouse on Tuesday and found the pair of gibbons on site.Preliminary inquiry revealed that Kesavanathan had purchased three Lar gibbons, two females and a male, from Manipur, and had applied for permission from state wildlife authorities to possess them.Two of the animals were subsequently handed over to Ranganathan and kept at his Injambakkam farmhouse, where his relative, actor Vikram, was earlier seen playing with one of them. The third gibbon died shortly after arriving at Kesavanathan’s Perundurai farmhouse, but he failed to report the death to district forest officials.“He should have conducted a post-mortem with the help of a veterinarian and informed us. This is a gross violation of rules,” Appala Naidu said, pointing to the lapse as a serious procedural breach.Officials further found that Kesavanathan had transferred the two surviving gibbons to Ranganathan’s farmhouse even before obtaining the mandatory possession certificate for the exotic animals.Under prescribed procedure, anyone importing an exotic animal must first secure a possession certificate from the forest department before the animal can be sold or gifted to another party. The recipient, in turn, is required to declare receipt of the animal and obtain a possession certificate of their own.
