After 75 years, cheetahs return to India in a grand experiment

Cheetahs once prowled India among lions, tigers and leopards. They appear in ancient Hindu texts and in cave paintings, and are woven into centuries-old tapestries. The Mughal emperor Akbar kept 1,000 cheetahs in his stables.

But for 75 years, the entirety of its existence as an independent nation, India has been bereft of cheetahs, the world’s fastest land animal.

That changed Saturday, when eight cheetahs arrived in India after a flight from Africa, initiating a great untried experiment for the world: whether a top predator population can be brought back to life in a place where it was long ago hunted into extinction.

The big cats boarded a Boeing 747 in Namibia on Friday and arrived in India on Saturday morning. Next, they will be flown by military helicopter to their new home, Kuno National Park, in a lush river valley where yellow butterflies flutter over miles of greenery in the state of Madhya Pradesh.

“It is the only large mammal that India has lost,” said S.P. Yadav, secretary of India’s National Tiger Conservation Authority.

“It is our moral and ethical responsibility to bring them back,” he said.

India’s government will spend roughly US$11 million (S$15.5 million), with support from Indian Oil, on the project over the next five years.

The eight cheetahs were a gift from the government of Namibia. The plan is to translocate batches of cheetahs from southern Africa until India achieves a population of around 40.

“We should be thinking of the global cheetah population as a single fragmented population that needs to be conserved,” said Dr Adrian Tordiffe, a wildlife veterinarian in South Africa who is helping to prepare a second batch of 12 cheetahs that India hopes to receive next month.

Apart from the cheetahs in South Africa’s national parks, some 500 of the animals are managed in privately owned reserves. As their numbers have grown, they have been exported to other African countries.

“If animals are not removed and relocated in this way, then reserves will become overcrowded and prey species numbers will suffer,” Dr Tordiffe said.

“What cheetahs need more than anything is protected space,” he added. “India offers a wonderful opportunity for the cheetah in terms of protected space.”

 

SOURCE: NEWS AGENCIES