The Quint is telling the full story of how climate change is reshaping lives in India. Help us do more. Become a member.
On 8 September, villagers in Odisha’s Balasore district came across five infant orangutans in the Ranakantha Reserve Forest. They were only six to eight months old, three females and two males. They should have been high in the rainforest canopies of Indonesia, clinging to their mothers. Instead, they were in Odisha.
This is not merely an unusual wildlife story. It is a story about us.
The orangutan is not native to India. The three recognised orangutan species—Sumatran, Bornean, and Tapanuli—are found only in Indonesia and Malaysia, and they all are critically endangered. The circumstances strongly suggest that the five infants were illegally trafficked into India, and authorities are now investigating how they arrived in India.
A report from The Wire has highlighted one possibility, that they were brought by sea from Indonesia’s Aceh province, an area where orangutan trafficking and confiscations have been documented. But the most disturbing question is not how they crossed the ocean.
If these babies were taken from the wild, conservation researchers say their mothers may have been killed while the infants were captured. That possibility changes the way we should look at those five small animals. They are not simply five rescued orangutans. They may be five survivors of a chain of violence that began in a rainforest far from India.