Seven decades after they became extinct in India, eight Cheetahs arrived in the country from Namibia by a special flight on Saturday morning and were released by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in Madhya Pradesh’s Kuno National Park (KNP).
The transcontinental journey of more than 8,000 km of the eight cheetahs — five female and three male and aged between 30 to 66 months — from Namibia began on Friday night and concluded around 11:30 am on Saturday.
The last cheetah died in the country in 1947 in Korea district in present-day Chhattisgarh, earlier part of Madhya Pradesh, and the species was declared extinct from India in 1952. While the ‘African Cheetah Introduction Project in India’ was conceived in 2009, the plan to bring the big cat to the KNP by November last year suffered a setback due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
The Kuno National Park, the new home of the cheetahs, is situated on the northern side of Vidhyachal mountains and is spread across more than 700 square km.
Two of the cheetahs imported from Namibia are siblings (brothers) while one malnourished female guest was nursed back to health by a farmer in the African nation, PTI quoted sources as saying.
After almost a month in the quarantine, they will be put in an acclimatization enclosure for up to four months before being released in the wild.
According to forest officials quoted by The Indian Express, the eight cheetahs will be fed buffalo meat as per their prescribed diet and special care will be taken to ensure that they have minimum interaction with humans during the quarantine period. They will later be moved into larger enclosures.
According to the Action Plan For Introduction of Cheetah in India envisaged by the Environment Ministry, the success of the project will depend on whether the feline species are able to become a part of the ecosystem and maintain natural rates of survival — 70 per cent for adults and 25-40 per cent for cubs.
On the short term, the government has laid ground to ensure success of the first phase of project, which includes achieving at least 50 per cent survival of the introduced cheetahs for the first year. The authorities also aim at establishing home range for cheetahs in Kuno so that they successfully reproduce in the wild and also ensure that some wild born cheetah cubs survive to at least over a year, and the first generation breeds successfully.
“Today, I also want to make a request to all countrymen. We will have to show patience and wait for a few months to see the cheetahs released in the Kuno National Park. Today these cheetahs have come as guests and are unaware of this territory. We have to give a few months’ time to these cheetahs to enable them to make Kuno National Park their home. India is trying its best to settle these cheetahs following international guidelines. We must not allow our efforts to fail,” Prime Minister Narendra Modi said after releasing two of the cheetahs in the special enclosure on Saturday.
Yadvendradev Jhala, dean of the Wildlife Institute of India told National Geographic, says there will be two more challenges for sustaining the cheetah population in Kuno: to keep building a prey base for the cheetahs, and to ensure that there is no poaching.
Kuno can house anywhere between 21 to 36 cheetahs. For the numbers to go up from eight to 21, it could take approximately 15 years and almost 30-40 years to take the count up to 36 depending on the survival of the animals.
Another major challenge faced by the eight African cheetahs is the threat that cheetahs face from the native population of more strong and aggressive, competing predator species – leopards, striped hyenas, jackals which are far higher in number and can outcompete them.
