Indian internet has been smitten by videos of furry, orange babies with sleepy eyes rolling on a forest floor. The discovery of five orangutan babies in the Udayapur-Talsari forest on the Odisha-West Bengal border has elicited plenty of oohs and aahs all around. They are now being cared for by Odisha forest officials at Nandankanan zoo. Beyond that, there are some serious whys and hows to answer on the endangered primates’ presence thousands of kilometres from their natural habitat in southeast Asian rainforests. Experts’ apprehension that this was a smuggling operation gone awry begs questions of the network and route. Odisha’s lessons from anti-poaching initiatives must be put to work more widely—it pays to train and incentivise locals along known smuggling routes to alert officials in time.
