Inside India's Booming Exotic Species Trade

The trade is being fuelled by a growing fascination with owning exotic and rare animals as pets

- Neha Bhatt

On the night of 6 December 2024, when Indigo Airlines flight 6E 1032 touched down in Chennai from Kuala Lumpur, it unloaded an unusual piece of luggage: nearly 5,200 red-eared slider turtles huddled in boxes, each smaller than the size of a palm. This was the third attempt in 2024 alone to smuggle thousands of red-eared sliders at the Chennai airport, a species native to the US and Mexico and one of the most sought-after exotic pets in India today. It is classified as a Schedule IV species under the Wildlife Protection Act of 1972, and its capture and sale are regulated by law.

Just weeks later, an eight-kilo live pangolin, one of the mammals most vulnerable to poaching, was seized in Assam, along with thousands of pangolin scales in separate raids conducted in Madhya Pradesh, Odisha, and Chhattisgarh, a joint operation between forest, police and wildlife authorities. Meanwhile, the same month, four African De Brazza's monkeys, with their distinctive long white beard and orange crowns, were rescued by the Assam Rifles force from Champhai in Mizoram.

By all accounts, India's exotic wildlife trade is booming, fuelled by a growing fascination with owning exotic and rare animals as pets—both as a status symbol and for their perceived medicinal properties. From pangolin, gibbon, iguana, non-native monkeys, to wallaby, kangaroo, tri-coloured squirrel, and birds such as the maleo and Visayan hornbill, the list of exotic species being seized across the country is growing every year, being smuggled from remote corners of the world.

Traffickers have become bolder in their operations, too. When three malnourished kangaroos were found hopping on a highway in West Bengal in 2022, reportedly abandoned by traffickers who had gone into hiding during a patrol, it sent shockwaves through the wildlife conservation community in India. To even the most seasoned rescuer, it was a shocking display of how insidious the exotic species crime racket had become.