India, March 15 -- Social media is rife with confessions of wildlife crimes. Photographs and videos are brazenly posted by offenders on platforms such as Instagram and Facebook and circulated widely as WhatsApp forwards. These depict acts of poaching and cruelty to wild creatures. Neither the Government of India nor the state governments have been able to devise a satisfactory response to this burden of evidence in the public domain.

Birds are kept captive in farmhouses away from the eyes of law-enforcement authorities as a source of amusement, prestige and enticing peer "likes and wah wahs" on digital media. Farmhouses near jungles serve as outposts for poaching and consuming game meats on the sly, a nefarious practice not easy to detec...