Vantara in talks with Brazil on ‘strategic cooperation’ on threatened species, FOIA documents reveal

Filed 2h ago · Via Mongabay · The Buffoon Desk

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Kevin MacLeod · incompetech.com · CC BY 4.0

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Documents obtained under Brazil's freedom of information law show that Vantara, the private Indian zoo founded by Anant Ambani and home to more than 150,000 animals, approached Brazil's biodiversity agency ICMBio in August 2025 proposing a 'strategic conservation partnership' covering unnamed threatened species.

The pitch arrived as Vantara faced scrutiny from CITES, which after a September 2025 inspection asked India to halt further endangered-species import permits over mismatched trade records, citing shipments including chimpanzees, snow leopards and a bonobo. That recommendation was voted down in November 2025 with Brazil among the dissenting votes.

Brazil has its own history with Vantara: a 2023 shipment of endangered Spix's macaws to the zoo already unsettled relations, and Brazil has spent decades trying to recover the species, declared extinct in the wild in 2019, through a captive reintroduction program that recently suffered a viral outbreak setback.

Vantara has since announced a self-imposed 12-month halt on imports dating back to June 2025, without addressing the 150,000 animals already in its care or acknowledging wrongdoing, while a coalition of 27 NGOs has called for a permanent end to wild imports.

The full dispatch is available from the source below.

✒ FROM THE EDITORIAL DESK

When a neighbor with 150,000 animals in the barn asks to borrow your rarest bird, you might count the ones you already lent him first. A pause on imports that starts before anybody asked for it, with no word about what's already inside the fence, is a promise to quit buying horses after the stable's full. Brazil spent decades trying to bring those macaws back from nothing, and it ought to want a better answer than ‘strategic cooperation’ before it signs anything.

Source: Read the original at Mongabay → Scored: Five Card Shuffle · Kevin MacLeod · CC BY 4.0

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