This National Wildlife Week, we look at the many ways human choices shape our relationship with wildlife — from what we grow and believe to what we consume and how we understand animals. Through four stories, the series explores everyday conflicts and connections, and the people finding more thoughtful ways to share space with wildlife.

Open Instagram, and the animals do not always look like contraband.

A tortoise on your Instagram feed. A colourful bird on someone’s shoulder. A tiny primate staring into the camera. Cute, right?

Welcome to the wildlife market.

Here, there’s no suspicious suitcase changing hands, no smuggler crossing a forest trail. Just a post, a private message.

And that is precisely the problem. India’s wildlife trade has found a new storefront online, where wild animals can be displayed, advertised and sold with the ease of ordering almost anything else on the internet.

The animals involved range from Indian species such as star tortoises, pangolins and parakeets to exotic reptiles, birds and primates brought into the country.

So, what exactly is being sold? 

A 2026 analysis by the Wildlife Trust of India (WTI) under GITOC’s EcoSolve project, based on seizures between 2019 and 2023, found more than 100 illegal pet-trade cases involving 109 species. 

Nearly four out of five species involved, or 79%, were exotic. Mammals accounted for 48% of the species seized, followed by reptiles at 26% and birds at 18%. About 65% of species confiscations took place in Northeast India, where India's international borders can also become routes for wildlife smuggling.

Pangolins, the world's most trafficked mammal, illustrate what that supply chain can look like.

A TRAFFIC and WWF-India analysis of seizure data from 2018 to 2022 recorded 342 seizure incidents involving at least 1,203 pangolins. The seizures represented an estimated 1,025 animals and 885 kg of pangolins and pangolin derivatives in the underlying records. Seizures were reported from 24 states and one Union Territory.

Odisha recorded the highest number of seizure incidents, with 74 cases involving an equivalent of 154 pangolins, followed by Maharashtra with 47 incidents involving 135 pangolins.

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And eight of those incidents involved online trade.

Just last month, the internet went crazy with the images of five infant orangutans that were found abandoned in a forest in Balasore, Odisha. Despite the species being native to the rainforests of Borneo and Sumatra and having no wild population in India.There is still much that remains unanswered about the five babies and the journey that brought them to Odisha.

The case came amid a string of exotic-animal seizures: 40 rare animals arriving from Kuala Lumpur were seized in Bengaluru in 2024, while customs authorities intercepted 284 exotic animals from Bangkok-bound consignments in Mumbai in 2025. 

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A post shared by Wildlife Trust of India (@wildlifetrustofindia)

These are not isolated examples of people keeping unusual pets. They offer a glimpse into a larger system in which wild animals can move through collectors, transporters, traders and buyers before ending up inside a home.

And the first point of contact may be a social-media post.

How does one post set a wildlife trade in motion?

“People do not need to become........

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