Skip to playerSkip to main content
  • 1 week ago
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.

Category

🗞
News
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
Be the first to comment
Add your comment

Recommended