IWN Report — Saturday, 24 October 2026
Young gibbons are being flown towards India in pet carriers and plastic baskets, and a new analysis finds that Indian airports accounted for most of the seizures when the trade peaked last year.
TRAFFIC, the wildlife trade monitoring network, counted at least 86 gibbons intercepted between January 2024 and August 2026 in a report called Canopy to Cabin, published on 23 October to coincide with World Gibbon Day. The figures cover 33 international smuggling incidents through airports, all of which involved Southeast Asia as a source, a transit point or a place where animals were gathered before onward travel.
TRAFFIC’s director for Southeast Asia said the smuggling of a few gibbons on each flight “may seem small in isolation”, and called for shared intelligence and joint investigations among the countries involved if enforcement is to get ahead of the criminal networks behind it.
Seizures peaked in 2025, mostly in India, according to TRAFFIC. Chennai in Tamil Nadu and Kempegowda in Bengaluru, Karnataka, were the destination airports named most often in the data.
The animals travelled in small pet carriers or plastic baskets packed into checked luggage, on journeys of several hours. Where age was recorded, every gibbon seized was a juvenile. The seizures covered six species, with the siamang and the agile gibbon reported most often.
Kuala Lumpur International Airport in Malaysia was the departure or transit point implicated most frequently, in more than a dozen cases. In 2026 more of the seizures happened in Malaysia and Thailand, before the gibbons reached their intended destinations, which TRAFFIC reads as a sign that detection is improving earlier along the trafficking chain.
All gibbon species are protected under national wildlife laws across their range, TRAFFIC points out, and CITES prohibits commercial trade in wild-caught specimens. The network has also traced India’s part in the ape trade through its analysis of the five orangutans abandoned in Odisha in September.
One of the cases in the report, a seizure from a house in Thailand rather than an airport, turned up suitcases, ventilated plastic containers and nappies alongside a gibbon and other animals.
Sources: TRAFFIC, Canopy to Cabin: Southeast Asia’s Gibbon Smuggling by Air (23 October 2026) · TRAFFIC · CITES