Natural History Wanderings

The Revelator reports

Traumatized, orphaned gibbon babies are stuffed into luggage and smuggled by air from southeast Asia to India.

For well over a year now, the Save the Gibbons Alliance, a group of small-ape conservationists and media professionals focused on protecting these long-armed primates from illegal trade, has been tracking a worrying problem. They’ve documented at least one gibbon-smuggling incident per month, either at a southeast Asian airport or an Indian one, each involving multiple gibbon babies or juveniles. News reports of these seizures in the local media are often accompanied by heartbreaking images of distressed or dead gibbon babies, stuffed into check-in or carry-on baggage.

Read more Asian Forests Grow Increasingly Silent as Gibbon Trafficking Hits an All-Time High