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A worker holds snakes which were caught and had their teeth removed. \u2014 Reuters<\/p>\n
Indian customs officers in Mumbai said they have stopped a plane passenger arriving from Thailand with a wriggling cargo of live snakes, the third such seizure this month.<\/p>\n
“Customs officers… foiled yet another wildlife smuggling attempt, 16 live snakes… seized from passenger returning from Thailand,” said customs officers in the airport in the Indian financial hub.<\/p>\n
The passenger, who arrived on Sunday, has been arrested, the customs agency said in a statement, with “further investigation underway”.<\/p>\n
The live snakes included reptiles often sold in the pet trade, and were largely non-venomous, or with venom too weak to affect people.<\/p>\n
They included garter snakes, a rhino rat snake and a Kenyan sand boa, among others.<\/p>\n
In early June, customs officers stopped a passenger smuggling dozens of venomous vipers, also arriving from Thailand.<\/p>\n
Days later, officers stopped another traveller carrying 100 creatures including lizards, sunbirds and tree-climbing possums.<\/p>\n
Wildlife trade monitor TRAFFIC, which battles the smuggling of wild animals and plants, has warned of a “very troubling” trend in trafficking driven by the exotic pet trade.<\/p>\n
More than 7,000 animals, dead and alive, have been seized along the Thailand-India air route in the last 3.5 years, it said.<\/p>\n
The snakes are a relatively unusual seizure in Mumbai, with customs officers more regularly posting pictures of hauls of smuggled gold, cash, cannabis or pills of suspected cocaine swallowed by passengers.<\/p>\n
However, in February, customs officials at Mumbai airport also stopped a smuggler with five Siamang gibbons, a small ape native to the forests of Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand.<\/p>\n
Those small creatures, listed as endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, were “ingeniously concealed” in a plastic crate placed inside the passenger\u2019s trolley bag, customs officers said.<\/p>\n
In November, customs officers seized a passenger carrying a wriggling live cargo of 12 turtles, and a month before, four hornbill birds, all on planes arriving from Thailand.<\/p>\n
In September, two passengers were arrested with five juvenile caimans, a reptile in the alligator family.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A worker holds snakes which were caught and had their teeth removed. \u2014 Reuters Indian customs officers in…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":28193,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[159,67,132,68,837],"class_list":{"0":"post-28192","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-wildlife","8":"tag-science","9":"tag-united-states","10":"tag-unitedstates","11":"tag-us","12":"tag-wildlife"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/114774568273607669","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28192","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28192"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28192\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/28193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28192"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28192"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28192"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}