How did five baby orangutans end up abandoned in India?

How did five baby orangutans end up abandoned in India?

Huddled and frightened, adjusting to an alien environment, five newly orphaned babies lay inexplicably in the forest’s undergrowth.

With shaggy, reddish-orange fur, wide eyes and long limbs, they were unlike any other animal found in this corner of eastern India. They were soon surrounded by a crowd of about 1,000 bewildered villagers, who alerted forest officials patrolling nearby.

When officers arrived, they were stunned. The animals were baby orangutans: critically endangered great apes; some of the world’s most intelligent animals, and a species prized by private collectors.

They belong thousands of kilometers away, in the Southeast Asian rainforests of Borneo and Sumatra. Yet here they were in India’s Odisha state, all under 18 months old, separated from their mothers, and then abandoned.

Pratik Prakash Indalkar, a forest officer from Balasore, a coastal city in eastern Odisha, told CNN his staff were not sure how to handle the find, which he characterized as “very surprising.”

Their discovery gripped India. For days, the plight of the Odisha quintet dominated headlines and primetime broadcasts. Yet for conservationists, their ordeal is a grim reminder of a far larger reality: a $20 billion illicit trade that tears critically endangered animals from their habitats and traffics them with ruthless efficiency.