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.
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.
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 investigators,” says Jose Louies, CEO and Chief of Enforcement at WTI. “What we are asking them to do is report what they come across.”
That distinction lies at the heart of WTI’s new ‘Scroll, Spot, Stop’ initiative, launched in June 2026.
The idea is that if a user comes across a post offering wildlife for sale, they should not engage with the seller or attempt to investigate the network themselves. Instead, they can report it.
The campaign builds on WTI’s wider cyber-monitoring work, in which information gathered online is developed into actionable form and passed to enforcement agencies. WTI has previously described its cyber-monitoring teams as a bridge between online wildlife crime and government enforcement.
Louies says the campaign is intended to create whistleblowers, not amateur investigators.
“During the campaign, ordinary people have already started sending us emails after coming across something online,” he says. “The idea is not to turn them into investigators, but to turn them into whistleblowers.”
A post can disappear within hours. A seller can change an account name, move to another platform, or shift a conversation from a public comment section to a private chat.
The internet does not create the demand for wildlife. But it can make that demand easier to connect with supply.
So… Scroll. Spot. Stop.
Scroll: You encounter a wildlife post while browsing.
Spot: Something about the animal, seller or claim raises a question.
Stop: Do not negotiate, purchase or investigate the seller. Report it.
“We have an open-source intelligence team and data analysts who gather information,” Louies says. “When we come across something online, we gather the relevant data and pass it to the enforcement agency. Investigation is a state function.”
The process can involve identifying the person behind an account, establishing links between profiles and mapping the wider chain.
“Sometimes these are fake IDs or accounts that do not show the person’s face or other details,” Louies says. “But through analysis, we can sometimes establish identifiable information about the person. That information is then passed to the enforcement agency.”
The objective is not merely to document a crime after it happens.
“The idea is to stop it before it happens,” he says.
How can a report turn into an enforcement action?
The first 24 hours matter.
Speed can determine whether a digital lead becomes an enforcement operation or disappears into the internet.
“There are instances where we have found an Instagram post on day one and reached the spot on day two,” Louies says. “If a case warrants immediate attention, there is a mechanism to respond.”
Deeya Bhattacharjee, WTI’s officer leading the initiative, says some cases have moved even faster.
“Very recently, we received information from the Northeast where we got the video on day one and, on the next day, the person involved was arrested,” she says.
The time required varies. A domestic case may be easier to act on than an international exotic-animal network, where investigators first need to understand the movement of the animal and the people involved.
“But if there is priority and we have fresh information, we can get it done in two or three days,” Bhattacharjee says.
That is why the campaign asks people to report rather than interact with the seller. Every additional conversation can alert a trafficker that someone is watching.
Turning the same screen against the trade
There is an irony at the centre of ‘Scroll, Spot, Stop’.
The sae platforms that help wildlife traders reach potential buyers can also help conservationists reach potential witnesses.
Bhattacharjee says anonymity, reach and speed have made social media attractive to illegal traders. A single advertisement can reach thousands of people, while the seller can move the conversation into private channels.
“So we thought: if they are using these platforms for this purpose, why not use the same platforms to sensitise people who are engaging with this kind of content?” she says.
The campaign therefore tries to change what happens after a wildlife post appears on someone’s screen.
Instead of liking it, sharing it or asking for a price, users are encouraged to recognise the animal, understand that its trade may be illegal and report it.
The campaign also looks at claims of legality.
“If they post pictures or information about legitimacy, such as certificates or permissions, we verify whether those are actually legitimate,” Bhattacharjee says. “In the cases we have examined, we have not yet reached the conclusion that the animals are legitimate and that all the required licences exist.”
So, a network needs a network
For Debobroto Sircar, who heads WTI’s Wildlife Crime Control Division, the campaign is also about correcting information that can normalise wildlife ownership.
Before launching it, WTI observed posts portraying protected or regulated animals as easy-to-own pets. Some, he says, were even being promoted as “cute” species that people could keep at home.
“We found that people were falsifying information, saying that some illegal species were legal and could easily be bought and sold online,” Sircar says.
The problem was not limited to individual sellers, he adds. Some media and social-media pages were also presenting wildlife primarily as desirable pets.
“So we thought these claims needed to be debunked,” he says. “And there was no better place to do that than on the same platforms.”
The campaign’s logic is captured in its name: Scroll. Spot. Stop.
“A network needs to fight a network,” Sircar says. “We wanted people to understand which species are illegal and, when they find something, report it to us.”
A domestic case may be easier to act on than an international exotic-animal network, where investigators first need to understand the movement of the animal and the people involved. Photograph: (Babagana Abubakar)
But removing a post is not always the same as stopping a trade.
Sircar points to the limitations of platform-specific enforcement. A post may be removed in India but remain accessible elsewhere. Users can also use VPNs or move conversations to encrypted platforms.
WTI is therefore seeking trusted-flagger status with social-media platforms, Sircar says. Such arrangements can allow recognised organisations to identify unlawful content and provide platforms with expert information to support faster removal.
The goal is to prevent wildlife-crime content from resurfacing elsewhere.
The legal rabbit hole…
Lovish Sharma, Environmental and Wildlife Law Specialist and Legal Advisor at WTI, explains that the 2022 amendment to the Wild Life (Protection) Act brought CITES-related provisions into India’s domestic legal framework.
“For a layperson, these are called exotic species,” he says. “Legally, they are referred to as scheduled specimens.”
Under the amended law, CITES-listed species are regulated domestically. Sharma says Schedule IV covers these scheduled specimens, while Schedules I and II protect specified native wild animals and Schedule III covers protected plants.
So, an exotic animal being in India does not automatically mean it is illegally possessed. What matters is how it entered the country, where it came from, and whether its documentation is genuine.
“A CITES permit alone is not sufficient to ascertain the legality of the trade,” Sharma says. “There are cases where fake permits have been used. There are also cases where an original permit exists, but the origin of the animal is not established — whether it was captured from the wild and then given the appearance of a legal trade.”
In other words, paperwork can make an illegal animal look legal.
“An illegal trade can be given the colour of a legal trade through a CITES permit,” he says. “Enforcement officials need to look beyond the permit.”
A cat-and-mouse game
For Louies, none of this means the digital fight will ever be over.
“When social media came up, the trade moved into social media. When it moved into social media, we were there,” he says. “When they change their strategy, we also change.”
It is, he calls it, a “cat-and-mouse game”.
Traffickers may stop posting telephone numbers. They may move from public advertisements to direct messages. They may use coded language, closed groups or multiple accounts.
WTI’s own research on online wildlife crime has documented this shift, with traders moving away from visible contact details towards private communications as monitoring increased.
That means enforcement cannot depend on one platform, one technology or one campaign.
It also means the person scrolling through a feed has become part of the enforcement equation.
The exotic-pet trade can look deceptively ordinary on a phone screen. A photograph can conceal a forest capture. A “pet for sale” message can conceal a chain of transporters. A certificate can conceal an uncertain origin.
‘Scroll, Spot, Stop’ is an attempt to close that gap.
