Chennai: Top wildlife and Chennai airport officials are worried about the surge in seizure of illegal wildlife produce in Chennai. If confidential sources are to be believed, the city, dormant for the past three years, is now back as a notorious transit point for illegal wildlife trade.
“As many as 10 cases of illegal wildlife trade have emerged from Chennai and Puducherry area in the past eight months,” said a state wildlife official pointing out that the situation with marine animals is worse.
Star tortoises and sea horses poached from south India are now making their way to Asian countries. There are seizures at Chennai airport and at the same time exotic animals including python, scorpion and primates have been smuggled in to Chennai and then deported back to Malaysia and Thailand in 2016, he said.
“In case of star tortoises, the smuggling had stopped since 2013 due to stern action taken by customs and central investigative agencies such as CISF, which issued a circular promoting suspensions, if there was any slack in baggage checking and this worked out, but now the illegal trade has returned. In the past two months alone more than 700 star tortoises have been rescued and 5,000 red eared turtles smuggled from Malaysia on July 29 were deported back to foreign airport,” said a Chennai airport source adding that last month also witnessed a deporting case of reticulate python to Taiwan.
Chennai is already a notorious place for shark fining and in 2015, the union ministry made an appeal to the airlines not to encourage export of shark fins from TN and subsequently a ban on such marine produce was brought in.
Chennai is also infamous for collecting peacock feathers from different parts of the state.
WWF – Traffic India an investigating agency on wildlife crimes has now started a study on the trail of illegal peacock feathers from TN to Malaysia and other foreign countries, a senior biologist with TN forest department said.
