Smuggled in a suitcase: The dark truth behind Gibbon trafficking

India Today

At Mumbai Airport, customs officers made a shocking discovery — two rare silvery gibbons stuffed inside a passenger’s trolley bag, one dead and one barely alive.

Transcript

00:00This is what the customs officers found stuffed inside a passenger's trolley bag at Mumbai airport

00:07on 30 October 2025. Two silvery gibbons, one was alive, the other dead. These rare apes are native

00:14to Java, Indonesia and fewer than 2,500 of them are left in the wild. Yet, they're being smuggled

00:20more and more, not just to India but across South and Southeast Asia. A recent analysis found over

00:26336 individual gibbons confiscated between January 2016 and August 2025, with seizures in 2025 alone

00:33already accounting for 20% of the total. Because gibbons are seen as status symbols, kept as pets

00:39and in some South Asian cultures even believed to have magical healing powers. In Myanmar, legends

00:45say gibbons can turn into humans and heal the sick with forest rituals. And in ancient China,

00:50Taoist texts linked them to spiritual energy, believing their bones could even detect poison.

00:55In this case, customs acted fast. The passenger was arrested under India's Wildlife Protection Act.

01:01But this isn't a one-off bust. Wildlife groups say gibbon trafficking is rising sharply with

01:06India becoming a major root. Every baby gibbon trafficked means an entire family wiped out in

01:11the wild. This tiny version of the lesser apes might look cute but it's part of a brutal trade

01:16pushing entire species to extinction.

01:21Long

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