Baby orangutans in India expose illegal wildlife trade as experts question a billionaire’s zoo

HANOI, Vietnam (AP) — The villagers who first spotted the five baby orangutans in a casuarina forest in India in early September were puzzled by their reddish hair and unfamiliar faces. The three males and two females, aged six to eight months — were left on a plantation in eastern India’s Odisha, over 2,700 kilometers (1,700 miles) from their native rainforests in Borneo and Sumatra, evidence of a growing illicit trade of apes being trafficked into India. They’re now at an Indian zoo, where keepers reportedly have been playing classical music to soothe them.

Wild orangutans are native only to the islands of Borneo and Sumatra, where they sustain rainforests by spreading seeds across vast areas, allowing trees to regenerate and store carbon that would otherwise contribute to global warming. The species is critically endangered, threatened by severe habitat loss. There are about 119,500 orangutans left in the wild, according to conservation organization World Wildlife Fund.

The global illegal wildlife trade is estimated to be worth $34 billion annually, according to a 2026 study by National University of Singapore researchers, and India is emerging as an important market. Experts say seizures reflect a fraction of a booming trade in exotic or non-native animals sold to wealthy Indian collectors. India’s wildlife laws were mainly designed to protect native species such as elephants, rhinoceroses and tigers from being trafficked overseas.

Gaps in controls on imported animals complicate efforts to trace the origins of exotic wildlife. In 2022, two juvenile Sumatran orangutans were found in boxes at a checkpoint between the northeastern states of Assam and Mizoram. Another was rescued in Mizoram in 2023, and a young orangutan was found in an apartment near Mumbai in November 2024.

At least 23 gibbons were seized at Indian airports in 2025, according to an analysis by nonprofit Wildlife Trust of India. In May 2026, Egyptian authorities seized three India-bound, sedated baby chimpanzees. “India has become the number one destination for the live trade of primates,” said Sinan Serhadli, a wildlife trafficking expert at the Orangutan Information Centre in Indonesia’s North Sumatra province.

India’s exotic wildlife trade and Southeast Asian trafficking routes Wealthy collectors who prize rare animals as “status symbols” are driving the trade in trafficked animals from…