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On the fringes of forests in eastern India, people stumble upon hungry, frightened marsupials they don’t know. Animals are kangaroos.
Three of the marsupials were rescued by wildlife officials this month as residents searched. One was found dead. Videos of the images seen were shared widely in India and garnered national attention.
Wildlife experts say the animals were born at breeding facilities in Southeast Asia and were likely smuggled overland to India to become exotic pets. Some social media users demanded the arrest of their traffickers. However, no arrests have been made so far.
Some see the sights as an example of how brazen the wildlife smuggling trade has become. MPs in the Indian Parliament are drafting legislation to close legal loopholes that allow many animal smugglers to go unpunished.
Belinda Wright, a wildlife activist living in the Indian capital, New Delhi, said India essentially has no “law” under which people can be arrested or prosecuted for possessing exotic species. “The authorities can only specify customs rules that prevent people from smuggling animals without paying customs duties or having a permit,” he said.
The police “can get them for smuggling, but not for anything else,” said Ms. Wright, executive director of the non-profit Wildlife Conservation Society in India. He said that after the exotic animals were successfully introduced into the country, people caught with them tended to falsely and successfully claim that they were bred in captivity domestically.
kangaroos never domesticated. The homeland of marsupials is Australia, which numbers tens of millions. hunted for generations. They were removed from the US endangered and threatened wildlife list in 1995.
The animals are not common pets in India, but in recent weeks kangaroos have been spotted walking along roadsides in the northeastern state of West Bengal, a known hotspot for wildlife smuggling.
Ms. Wright said the chances of such kangaroos breeding in the wild in India are slim, mainly because they are mammals, not plants or amphibians. He also added that they tend to be smuggled into the country once or twice, rather than being part of large groups of animals that can reproduce and form a community.
In a recent kangaroo sighting, Sanjay Dutta, a forestry official in West Bengal, called residents of a nearby village while patrolling a protected area to say they had discovered some unfamiliar wild creatures.
Mr Dutta said of the creatures he found in the village of Milanpally, “he seemed scared and injured and looking for something to eat”.
According to the wildlife experts who looked after them, they were dehydrated and malnourished when they were taken to the North Bengal Wild Animal Park, a safari centre.
The smuggling of endangered and exotic fauna is an “unfortunate and growing trend” in India, partly the result of rules restricting the trade of native species. said in a report Two years ago.
Customs officials in the country have confiscated thousands of non-native species in recent years, including hawks, finches, orangutans, monkeys and macaws. Some were in danger; many were destined to be sold as exotic pets.
Wildlife officials who found the kangaroos this month are working in a narrow, landlocked corridor in northeastern India on the border of Bangladesh and Nepal. The corridor is known as an important transit point for smugglers transporting exotic animals from Southeast Asia.
India was among the first signatories of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, or CITES, a 1975 treaty designed to ensure that trade does not endanger the survival of threatened and endangered species.
But Debadityo Sinha, a senior assistant at the Vidhi Center for Legal Policy in New Delhi, said India lagged behind other countries in providing CITES with a “proper legislative structure” in its legal system.
A proposed amendment to India’s Wildlife (Conservation) Act 1972 would place the possession of exotic species within the scope of wildlife conservation authorities rather than customs officials. Legislation draft, currently on committeeIt is expected to pass when introduced in Parliament. Mr Sinha said this would likely “address to some extent the legal loophole in the regulation of exotic species in India”.
For now, India’s erratic rules on imported wildlife are a draw for smugglers who look to wealthy customers willing to pay a premium for unusual pets in New Delhi, Mumbai and other major cities.
One of three kangaroos found alive in West Bengal this month died later.
The two remaining people are slowly recovering and will likely be sent to a zoo in Kolkata city, several hundred miles away, said the park’s director, Dawa S. Sherpa.
“There are already a lot of kangaroos out there, and the zoo has the proper infrastructure,” he said. “Let them grow up there.”
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