Put me in your pants! (Photo courtesy of NASA.)
The slender loris has endured a mighty struggle to survive. This struggle generally involves things like poaching by crazy people who think lorises can cure things like impotence and asthma, but on Monday, that struggle involved a lone loris’ attempt to breathe while inside of a man’s pants. The man in question was attempting to smuggle the loris out of India by sticking it in his underwear.
Nothing would delight us more than to tell you this incident, at New Delhi International Airport, was unusual. Unfortunately, as long as there have been rare animals, there have been humans stuffing rare animals down their pants. Just recently, officials in India stopped a man with 10 turtles in his briefs. In 2010, a German man tried to smuggle 44 live geckos out of New Zealand in his underwear. He was sentenced to 12 weeks in jail. No word yet on a punishment for the loris dude (although he and his accomplices were arrested by customs police), but we are going to imagine that the Indian government does not think holding a monkey against your nuts for a few hours will count as time served.
