The central government recently announced plans to reintroduce the cheetah to the country, nearly 75 years after the big cat went extinct in India. Union Environment Minister Bhupender Yadav on Wednesday launched an action plan that will bring the fastest land mammal back to India over the next five years.
“The cheetah that went extinct in independent India is about to return,†Yadav said.
What is the plan?
Speaking at the 19th meeting of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA), Yadav said the government will bring back 50 cheetahs over the next five years to form a founder population as part of the plan to reintroduce the species into India.
While the plan was due to launch in 2021 and reintroduce cheetahs to Madhya Pradesh, the plan had to be postponed due to the overwhelming constraints introduced by the COVID-19 pandemic.
As part of the action plan to reintroduce the animal to the country, cohorts of around ten cheetahs will be introduced to several sites surveyed at the same time. Cheetahs will be imported from Namibia or South Africa, two nations that are home to significant numbers of big cats.
“An existing coalition of wild males will be selected while the selected females will also be known to each other to the extent possible,” says the action plan.
“The lineage and condition of the animals should be checked in the host country to ensure that they do not come from an excessively inbred stock and that they belong to the ideal age group, in order to conform to the needs of a founding population, â€he added.
The central government, the Ministry of the Environment and the Cheetah task force will work together to form a framework for collaboration with the Namibian and South African governments through the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
The 10 potential reintroduction sites studied are located in the five states of central India, although Kuno Palpur National Park (KNP) in Madhya Pradesh is expected to be where the first cohort will arrive there. The KNP park was prioritized for its suitable habitat as well as the presence of a population of prey large enough to support the animals.
How did cheetahs become extinct in India?
Many may not know that the cheetah was declared de facto extinct in India as early as 1951-1952, although rare sightings of a few rare wild specimens took place until 1970. People still call a number of cats covered with rosettes, like the leopard, like the Cheeta, a word which itself is derived from the Sanskrit word Chitraka (“spotted”).
But the animal, whose range once stretched from the Arabian Peninsula to the vast jungle of eastern India, has been driven to extinction in almost all of its habitat. Today, the Asian cheetah is only found in Iran, numbering less than a hundred. The majority of the world’s cheetah population is found in southern and eastern Africa, where the African cheetah is found in countries like South Africa and Namibia.
Cheetahs numbered in the thousands in India, with the animal officially known as the Indian cheetah until its extinction in the country. Mughal Emperor Akbar alone is said to have a menagerie of over 9,000 cheetahs.
The animal is extremely easy to tame, compared to other non-domesticated predators, and was used for hunting prey, a sport called “racing.” The animal was a popular part of many royal courts in India and other parts of Asia where it was found. But another trait of the cheetah was that it was impossible to breed in captivity. There was only one successful attempt to breed a cheetah in captivity until the 20th century, an event recorded by Emperor Jahangir in 1613 in the book Tuzuk-i-Jahangiri.
As the number of cheetahs declined due to the high number of cheetahs collected from the wild, the animal was also eventually brought to extinction with the advent of the widespread hunting brought to India during the time of the British Raj.
While the government has officially declared that the animal has become extinct due to desertification, experts suggest the animal had plenty of habitats and prey to survive if it was not hunted to extinction. .
Previous attempts
This plan is not the only effort by India to reintroduce the majestic animal to the country. In the 1970s, then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi asked the Environment Ministry to write a formal request to the Shah of Iran to import some of the Asian cheetahs present in the country.
But while Iran’s response has been positive, the plan came to naught with the declaration of emergency in India and the overthrow of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi in ​​Iran.
While the government is now reintroducing African cheetahs to the country, distinct from the Asian cheetah, many cheetah conservatives are enthusiastic about bringing the endangered animal to sustainable population levels.
(Edited by : Jomy Jos Pullokaran)
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