Cheetahs to return to India 70 years after being declared extinct

Seventy years after being declared extinct in India, cheetahs are all set to return to the country next month, following New Delhi’s recent agreement with Namibia to import eight for captive breeding.

Wildlife officials said four female and four male cheetahs would be ferried from Namibia to the Kuno-Palpur National Park in central Madhya Pradesh state, 500km southwest of Delhi, in the run-up to India’s 75th independence day celebrations on August 15th.

“The memorandum of understanding [with Namibia] seeks to promote conservation and restoration of the cheetah in their former range from which the species went extinct,” tweeted India’s environment minister Bhupender Yadav last week, after signing the agreement in Delhi.

Environment ministry officials said Kuno Park’s ground staff were stocking up on natural prey in the 10sq km enclosure where the cheetahs are to be housed.

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Experts anticipate their numbers multiplying to about 20 over the next five years in the park’s grasslands that, wildlife officials claim, were somewhat akin to the African Savanah region that remains one of the cheetah’s last redoubts in the world.

The Kuno Park area and nearby jungles were earlier home to hundreds of Asian cheetahs more than a century ago, with numerous folk tales woven around their speed, ferocity and cunning. They can run at up to 70km/h.

But they were hunted down for bounty and sport during colonial rule, with the last three cheetahs being shot dead by a maharajah shortly after Indian independence in 1947, and officially declared extinct five years later.

The government’s initiative to reintroduce cheetahs was not without opposition from local naturalists and animal preservationists.

Conservationist Valmik Thapar maintained that locally reinstating the African cheetah would be a “waste” of taxpayers’ money, as the Indian countryside had neither the prey species, nor the space to enable it to multiply in any significant numbers.

He told the Times of India last month that the authorities could “hand feed” the cheetahs and have people observe them in fenced-off, drive-in enclosures by spending millions of dollars, but reinstating them in the wild in India was “impossible”.

Other environmentalists claimed that the cheetah was a “fragile and precious” predator that needed special care and looking after, which was largely impossible in India due to a variety of handicaps.

Besides, they said tens of thousands of people who had encroached on to the cheetahs’ potential breeding ground in Kuno’s grasslands would need relocating which, in the case of other species, had previously proven unworkable.

Earlier efforts to re-establish the cheetah in India in the 1970s by importing them from Iran had failed after negotiations ended when the Shah was deposed.

Sporadic endeavours followed thereafter, but in 2013 India’s supreme court approved the domestic introduction of cheetahs from Namibia, and instructed the federal environment ministry to identify suitable habitats to house them.