Some 2,000 km away from their natural habitat in the rainforests of Borneo and Sumatra, five listless baby orangutans were found, bafflingly, in a forest in the middle of Odisha on Tuesday. Videos that were shared widely, showed the critically endangered apes, each around a year old, with limited mobility, huddled together, chomping on bananas from a container. And then more videos emerged of the group being bottle-fed in a Bhubaneswar Zoo where they are now being monitored.
Jose Louies, CEO of the Wildlife Trust of India, said that it is clear that these animals had been kept in captivity for while, because of their complete lack of fear of humans. CITES prohibits the commercial trade in orangutans but these animals are routinely sold as exotic pets, and can cost upto Rs. 20 lakh.
This discovery has renewed discourse on international wildlife trafficking. India’s Wildlife Crime Control Bureau has been asked to investigate the matter. There are many enigmas: How were they trafficked? By sea? Air? Road? Who captured and smuggled them? And who are their collectors? This is not the first time these apes have been found in India. In 2022, two baby orangutans were found abandoned near the border between the Assam and Mizoram.
Clues for the globe
Now, a new study that integrates 30 years of confiscation data, criminological modelling, and spatial network analysis, unravels the critical trade routes of another much-trafficked species, Mexico’s parrots, from biodiverse habitats to urban centres around the world, which may provide clues to the criminal networks in other parts of the world.
By integrating criminological theory with landscape-scale network modelling, scientists deconstructed the illicit trade network, making it more visible and predictable. What they gathered was “a shift toward a more organized trade catering to specific consumer preferences in growing urban areas.”
Today, the socioeconomic link to poverty has vanished and has been replaced by human population size as the sole significant driver, cementing the role of urban centres as the nexus of demand, the paper added. “For many commonly traded species, confiscations occurred hundreds of kilometers from their native habitats, frequently in major cities like Mexico City.”
A massive urban demand is reorganising the global wildlife trafficking network. “The drivers of Mexico’s illegal parrot trade have fundamentally shifted over the past three decades, evolving from a trade of opportunity rooted in rural poverty to demand centered on urban population density.”
No less than half of Mexico’s native parrot species are directly threatened by trapping for the illegal wildlife trade, said the researchers, “elevating their risk of extinction”. They found that poachers consistently targeted “charismatic,” and high-value species, particularly macaws and Amazon parrots, at unsustainable rates.
Wildlife and narcotics
This framework can be adapted to map other complex illicit networks, such as the trafficking of timber, marine life, or even drugs and weapons. There is a distinct convergence between wildlife trafficking and broader organised crime: drug cartels in Mexico, for instance, regularly run illegal logging operations, sharing transport logistics and laundering illicit timber alongside narcotics, said the paper.
Illicit wildlife networks is converging with broader organised crime, and criminal networks that “are complex, adaptive, and largely invisible, making them notoriously difficult to map, track, and disrupt,” said the authors. And this, it added, needs a new approach “to move from enforcement-based, isolated seizures to a predictive understanding of network structure and vulnerability.”
The lacunae in the understanding of mechanisms that feed criminal networks comes in the way of law enforcement, said the paper, adding that illegal wildlife trade “comprises global, multibillion-dollar criminal enterprises that threaten biodiversity and elevate the risk of zoonotic disease transfer and emergence.”
As for India, primates, turtles and lizards are the most smuggled illegal species into the country, Dr. Jose told The Hindu. The species smuggled out of India are largely turtles, parakeets and golden langurs. The smuggling occurs primarily through land routes between India and Myanmar, he added. “The criminal network is amoebic in nature: it configures and re-configures to safeguard the business,” he said.
Published – September 11, 2026 08:00 am IST
