IWN Daily Digest — Monday, 28 September 2026
A mother elephant and her two calves were found dead in a paddy field in Salboni, West Bengal, on Sunday morning, electrocuted by a wire farmers had strung around their fields in one of the state’s most important elephant habitats.
As reported by National Herald India (via IANS):
“At least three elephants, including a mother and her two calves, are found dead in a paddy field in Salboni, West Midnapore, on Sunday morning, in a suspected case of electrocution. The deaths have raised fresh concerns over the danger posed to elephants by illegally energised fences and live wires around agricultural fields in West Bengal’s Jangalmahal region, a major elephant habitat.”
The elephants had wandered out of the forest and into farmland in West Midnapore when they touched a wire connected to an irrigation pump, forest officials said. Villagers spotted the carcasses early on Sunday and alerted the West Bengal Forest Department, which has sent samples for a post-mortem to confirm the exact cause of death.
Farmers in Jangalmahal commonly rig live wires around their fields to keep elephants from raiding crops, a forest department source told reporters, adding that warnings and past penalties have done little to stop the practice. A tusker died the same way last month at an illegally energised fence in Falakata block, Alipurduar district.
Exotic Trouble
Far from Bengal’s paddy fields, a new feature from ThePrint traces how India’s exotic pet trade has slipped from remote border crossings onto Instagram feeds, with smuggled parrots, geckos and even orangutans marketed to buyers as status symbols.
As reported by ThePrint:
“The five baby orangutans found in Odisha may have grabbed headlines with their adorable pictures going viral, but behind those innocent faces lies a grim reality. Wildlife trafficking to feed a growing market for ‘exotic pets’ is thriving in India, often in plain sight, with animals smuggled across international borders as part of a multibillion-dollar black market.”
The Central Bureau of Investigation has registered close to 100 wildlife-crime cases since 1997, covering everything from tiger skins and bones to rhino poaching, pangolin scales, red sanders and exotic animals, ThePrint reported. Around 84 species of exotic reptile are now prominent in the trade, with networks running from Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia through Myanmar and India’s north-eastern border states to buyers in Delhi, Kerala and Tamil Nadu.
As ThePrint put it, the trade “has become a status symbol, something to show off in Instagram reels and videos.” A 2025 CBI seizure in Delhi turned up 14 exotic birds and three iguanas, and the agency has been training foreign counterparts to fight the trade — 65 officers from other countries’ law-enforcement agencies attended its ITEC courses on wildlife crime in 2024 and 2025.
Sources: National Herald India · ThePrint
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