Cheetah reintroduction in India - online puzzles

Cheetah reintroduction in India

More than 70 years after India's native subspecies of the cheetah—the Asiatic cheetah (Acinonyx jubatus venaticus)—became extinct there, small numbers of Southeast African cheetah (Acinonyx jubatus jubatus) have been flown in from Namibia and South Africa to a national park in India. The experiment has been permitted by India's supreme court on a short-term basis to test long-term adaptation. The Asiatic subspecies is now found only in Iran in critically endangered numbers.The Asiatic cheetah whose long history on the Indian subcontinent gave the Sanskrit-derived vernacular name "cheetah", or "spotted", to the entire species, Acinonyx jubatus, also had a gradual history of habitat loss there. In Punjab, before the thorn forests were cleared for agriculture and human settlement, they were intermixed with open grasslands grazed by large herds of blackbuck; these co-existed with their main natural predator, the Asiatic cheetah. The blackbuck is no longer extant in Punjab. Later, more habitat loss, prey depletion, and trophy hunting were to lead to the extinction of the Asiatic cheetah in other regions of India.

Discussions on cheetah reintroduction in India began soon after extinction was confirmed, in the mid-1950s. Proposals were made to the governments of Iran from the 1970s, but fell through chiefly for reasons of political instability there. Offers from Kenya for introducing African cheetahs were made as early as the 1980s. Proposals for the introduction of African cheetahs were made by the Indian government in 2009, but disallowed by India's supreme court. The court reversed its decision in early 2020, allowing the import of a small number, on an experimental basis for testing long-term adaptation. On 17 September 2022, five female and three male southeast African cheetahs, between the ages of four and six (a gift from the government of Namibia), were released in a small quarantined enclosure within the Kuno National Park in the state of Madhya Pradesh. The cheetahs, all fitted with radio collars, will remain in the quarantined enclosure for a month; initially, the males (and later the females) will be released into the 748.76 km2 (289.10 sq mi) park. The relocation has been supervised by Yadvendradev V. Jhala of the Wildlife Institute of India and zoologist Laurie Marker, of the Namibia-based Cheetah Conservation Fund. Subsequently, 12 cheetahs from South Africa will be released in Kuno; eventually, the total number of African cheetahs in Kuno will be brought up to 40 individuals. As of May 25, 2023, three adult cheetahs from Africa and three cubs (of four born in Kuno two months earlier) had died in Kuno National Park.

The scientific reaction to the translocation has been mixed. Adrian Tordiffe (a wildlife veterinary pharmacologist at the University of Pretoria who will be supervising the release of the cheetahs) is an enthusiast, who views India as providing "protected space" for the fragmented and threatened population of the world's cheetahs. K. Ullas Karanth, one of India's tiger experts, has been critical of the effort, considering it to be a "PR exercise." India's "realities", he says, such as human overpopulation, and the presence of larger feline predators and packs of feral dogs, could all cause potentially "high mortalities," and require a continual import of African cheetahs. Kuno National Park is a relatively new national park, having received that status in 2018. It had been founded previously as a wildlife sanctuary to implement the Asiatic Lion Reintroduction Project, which aimed to establish a second Asiatic lion population in India. The goal was to protect the isolated lions of the Gir National Park (in Gujarat) from a potential mass mortality event, set off by the outbreak of an epizootic. Although the state government of Gujarat was ordered by India's Supreme Court in April 2013 to transfer a small population of lions from Gujarat to Kuno, and was given six months to complete the transfer, they ultimately resisted implementing the order.