10 Strange Attempts to Smuggle Animals

Certain people have a strong desire to own strange and unusual animals—and they will pay big bucks to do it. The trade in exotic animals is thought to be worth as much as $40 billion each year. While much of this trade is legal and done in accordance with animal safety laws and avoids depopulating wild populations, there are those who decide the best path to riches is to smuggle animals across borders.

Animal smugglers often do weird things in their attempts to hide animals from police forces, and here are ten of the strangest. And these are just the ones who got caught.

Related: Top 10 Bizarre Ways People Smuggled Drugs

10 Is That a Snake in Your Pants?

Despite not being the most huggable of creatures, snakes are very popular pets. When one man wanted to take 104 live snakes from Hong Kong to mainland China, he apparently did not want to fill out the required paperwork or declare them with customs. So, how was he to get his writhing migrants to their destination undetected? For him, the obvious solution was to stuff them down his trousers.

Using modified pockets lined with multiple bags, the man slipped the 104 snakes down his pants and confidently strode toward his goal. Despite walking through the “Nothing to Declare” door, officials clearly noticed something odd about the man with the squirming trousers and decided to investigate. That was when the unnamed man’s snake-smuggling attempt was detected.

Since this event occurred in July 2024, it is unknown what the man’s punishment will be or what he hoped to do with the snakes in China. Perhaps they were emotional support reptiles?^[1]

9 Bird-Brained Bird Smuggler

When Sony Dong flew into Los Angeles International Airport after a long flight from Asia, he was probably suffering all the usual effects of jet lag. He was tired, stiff, and grouchy, but that was not what drew the attention of customs officers. When Sony was inspected, it was noted that feathers were sticking out the end of his pants, and what looked like bird droppings were coating his socks. When he was stripped, investigators found over a dozen songbirds strapped to Sony’s legs.

The songbirds were thought to be worth several hundred dollars each. When Sony’s home was raided, more imported birds were discovered. For his crimes, Sony received a four-month jail sentence in 2010. Alas, this did not stop Sony from participating in bird smuggling. In 2018, Sony was jailed for 18 months in federal prison after being arrested while waiting for a courier hiding 30 birds in a suitcase at the same airport.^[2]

8 Chirping Bag

The trouble with trying to smuggle live animals is that they tend to do things that attract the attention of officials trying to catch them. Therefore, it must have seemed much easier for Szu Ta Wu to smuggle a batch of parrot eggs into the United States. Eggs are typically quite quiet and don’t move around much. Unfortunately, if you look after an egg for long enough, they do tend to hatch. That is what happened to the eggs in Wu’s bag, and the chirping of the hatchlings attracted the attention of customs officers.

The eggs had been stolen from nests in Central America and were being transported in a special temperature-controlled bag to Miami in 2023. The smugglers clearly wanted the eggs to arrive alive, but they did not seem to factor in the hatching of the eggs. When the bag was opened, around 30 eggs and chicks were discovered. They were taken to a specialist center where the rest of the eggs were hatched, and the chicks were fed by hand to ensure they survived.

Wu could face up to 20 years in prison for his attempt to bring the birds into the country illicitly.^[3]

7 Fish Skirts

Who says animal smuggling can’t be fashionable? When Sharon Naismith sashayed in Melbourne after a flight from Singapore, she must have been feeling good. She was wearing a lovely skirt and thought she was about to make a windfall from what she was hiding underneath it. However, Customs officers noticed something a bit fishy when they heard “flipping” noises from Naismith’s waist.

When Naismith was examined, it was found that she was wearing a specially prepared apron covered in pockets. In these pockets were plastic bags of water containing tropical fish. Fifty-one fish were recovered from the unconventional garment, and Naismith was charged with various crimes. Australia is particularly strict when it comes to importing non-native species.

Despite potentially facing a maximum of ten years in prison, Naismith was sentenced to 9 months of community service for her attempt to fashionably commit a crime.^[4]

6 Tortoise or Cake?

For a while the internet was obsessed with cakes made to closely resemble almost anything other than cake. Perhaps this trend made a German smuggler think he could elude a customs check on his return from a trip to Morocco in 2019.

When the man was stopped and his bags examined, a box of fancy patisserie was discovered. Inside were what the smuggler insisted were nothing more than incredibly realistic tortoise cakes. So realistic were these chocolate-covered critters that they could even be seen moving around. The customs officers were not fooled and confronted the man with the reality that he was attempting to smuggle endangered Moroccan tortoises into Germany.

It is not known what sentence the criminal cake-lover received, but the tortoises were rescued from their box and taken to a rescue center to be cared for.^[5]

5 Otter in Underwear

You might be tempted to wear baggy clothes on a plane for comfort, but one man had another reason for doing so in 2023. He was wearing loose trousers to conceal his package. However, Authorities at the Bangkok airport decided to look at what was in those pants before letting him board a flight to Taipei. There was a suspiciously large bulge, and inside were three socks, each with a live animal inside.

The 22-year-old man claimed that he had been at a market and purchased what turned out to be two short-clawed otters and one prairie dog. These otters are an endangered species and should not be kept by anyone unless they are specially trained and part of a conservation effort. It need not be said that stuffing them into socks and sticking them in your pants does not constitute best practice for animal keeping.^[6]

4 Snakes in a Bra

In 2023, a woman stepped off the ferry from Hong Kong into China and tried to get through customs without drawing any attention to her bosom. In this, she failed, and authorities decided to get a closer look at what was in her bra. Inside were five snakes, which had been wrapped in stockings in an attempt to conceal them and smuggle them into the country. However, this attempt at smuggling snakes in a brassiere was not the most impressive attempt.

In 1995, officers in Sweden reportedly noticed “something weird” about a woman’s chest. She seemed to be itching rather a lot, so she was searched. Inside her bra were 65 young grass snakes. She also had a number of lizards around her midriff. When questioned, the smuggler claimed she hoped to start a snake farm.^[7]

3 Tiger in a Suitcase

In the United Kingdom, there have been a number of cases where police rush to the scene of a potential tiger on the loose only to discover that it is simply a stuffed toy. A smuggler in Bangkok was hoping that this difficulty in telling fake from real tigers worked both ways when they set out to board a flight to Iran. Inside their bag was what they claimed was a stuffed toy that looked very much like a tiger.

When the bag went through an x-ray machine, officers had several questions, however, as stuffed toys generally do not have bones in them. When the bag was opened, a sedated tiger cub was found concealed inside. The smuggler was quickly arrested, and the tiger cub was taken away to be cared for. It survived the ordeal fairly well, and investigations began into whether the cub had been taken from the wild or was bred in captivity.^[8]

2 Monkey Girdle

How many monkeys can you strap to your body before people will begin to ask questions? For Roberto Sol Cabrera, it turned out the answer was somewhat fewer than 18. When he landed at a Mexico City airport in 2010 after a flight from Peru, it was noticed that he was acting nervously. So officers decided to check the unusual lumps on his waist. Inside Cabrera’s clothes, they discovered a girdle, and attached to it were 18 Titi monkeys that had been stuffed into socks for easy transportation.

At first, Cabrera claimed to have done this for the safety of the little monkeys as he did not want to expose them to X-rays by putting them in his luggage. Tragically, if this was his intent, he failed, and two of the monkeys had died by the time he was caught. Cabrera’s dreams of a big payday from selling the monkeys in Mexico were crushed when the monkeys were confiscated.^[9]

1 Pregnant with a Monkey

The first rule of animal smuggling is surely that if you successfully smuggle an animal, you don’t go around boasting about your crime. Gypsy Lawson apparently did not know this simple dictum when she managed to sneak a rhesus monkey into the United States from Thailand in 2007.

It seems that Lawson and her mother hatched an absurd plot to get the monkey through customs by pretending to be pregnant and hiding the sedated animal under her shirt. It is a scheme that should not work outside of a poorly written sitcom, but it seems to have gone without a hitch as the monkey soon began living in her home. She would have gotten away with the crime if she had not told a worker in a clothes shop about it. The worker told the police, who raided Lawson’s home and found the monkey, as well as journals detailing the crime and the experiments that had been carried out to find the right medication to keep the monkey quiet during the journey.

Lawson and her mother were sentenced to 60 days in jail, fined, and given community service for their smuggling.^[10]

fact checked by
Darci Heikkinen