smuggled out of India into Bangladesh, every day" in 2015, but the rate of this smuggling has dropped because of rising surveillance at the international border. The cattle smuggling rate is placed at nearly two million a year by Robert Wirsing and Samir Das in a 2016 report, with an annual value of about US$1.5 billion. Cattle smugglers, states The Times of India, use dyes to recolor and camouflage the cattle. This makes cattle identification difficult to ease their smuggling across the border, while some groups use grazing pretext to evade the Indian Border Security Force. Hundreds of thousands of cows, states the British newspaper The Independent in a 2012 article, are illegally smuggled from India into Bangladesh every year to be slaughtered. Gangs from both sides of the border are involved in this illegal smuggling involving an estimated 1.5 million (15 lakhs) cattle a year, and cattle theft is a source of the supply, states Andrew Buncombe. According to a 2014 report by The International Business Times, criminal gangs steal and smuggle cattle from India into Bangladesh, an operation that yields them "hundreds of millions of dollars annually in illicit profits". Not only it hurts the cattle owners, the activity is dangerous as it leads to deaths of the "perpetrators and innocent bystanders", states Palash Ghosh. According to The New Indian Express, the villagers near the Bangladesh border state that cow thefts in the region increase before and during the Islamic festival of Ramzan and then these are smuggled across the border nearby. The Eid-ul-Zuha, or the Islamic festival of animal sacrifice, increases the demand for sacrificial cattle in Bangladesh and the illegal activity by the cattle smugglers across the porous border from West Bengal through Assam to Tripura, states The Economic Times. Indian border officials have been using various strategies to reduce or end the smuggling across the Bangladesh border. They allege that their Bangladeshi counterparts are not doing as much as they could, states Katy Daigle, to prevent "illegal cross-border smuggling" of cattle. In contrast, some Bangladeshi officials state that cattle smuggling and associated crime would end if India would accept cow slaughter and legalize cow exports for beef production in Bangladesh. Bangladesh and India share over 4,000 kilometers of border, with many rivers, hills, highways and rural roads. The border is quite porous to goods and people movement. The border security is limited and cattle smuggling