Five baby orangutans have been found in a forest in India’s eastern state of Odisha, far from their natural habitat, prompting an investigation into how they got there.<\/p>\n
Photographs and videos widely shared online show the young apes sitting together on the forest floor and eating bananas, thousands of kilometres from the tropical rainforests where they belong.<\/p>\n
Orangutans are not native to India. The critically endangered apes are found in the wild only in Indonesia and Malaysia.<\/p>\n
Odisha’s forest minister has said investigators are examining whether the animals were trafficked into the country by an international smuggling network and abandoned near a highway.<\/p>\n
The orangutans were rescued early on Tuesday in Balasore district after local people spotted them and alerted forest officials.<\/p>\n
They were given first aid before being taken to Nandankanan Zoological Park in the state capital, Bhubaneswar, where they are in quarantine and being monitored.<\/p>\n
Balasore District Forest Officer Pratik Prakash Indalkar told the BBC that the animals could not have reached Odisha naturally and may have been transported there by road.<\/p>\n
“The five animals were found in Ranakata, a proposed reserve forest in Bhogarai block, near the West Bengal border,” he said.<\/p>\n
“The area is covered mainly by casuarina trees and is not a dense forest. It is also close to a state highway.”<\/p>\n
The Odisha government has also reportedly asked India’s Wildlife Crime Control Bureau to investigate. Police, forest officials and a special task force are involved in the inquiry.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Five baby orangutans have been found in a forest in India’s eastern state of Odisha, far from their…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":765025,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[90,56,54,55,4407],"class_list":["post-765024","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-wildlife","tag-science","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom","tag-wildlife"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/765024","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=765024"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/765024\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/765025"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=765024"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=765024"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=765024"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}