Cheetahs to return to Indian wild 63 years after last three shot dead

The cheetah is to return to India more than 60 years after hunters shot the last three on the subcontinent.

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August 1, 2010

Article by adp news

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Jairam Ramesh, Indian minister for the environment and forests, has picked three sites for the reintroduction of the animal within a year. Eighteen cheetahs are to be brought from Iran, Namibia and South Africa. A budget of more than £500,000 (HK$6 million) has been made available to prepare the sites for their release.

“It is important to bring the cheetah back as it will help restore the grasslands of India,” Ramesh said. “The way the tiger restores forest ecosystems, the snow leopard restores mountain ecosystems, and the Gangetic dolphin restores waters in the rivers, in the same way the cheetah will restore our grasslands.”

India’s wildlife has struggled in recent decades. The country’s population of tigers has shrunk from more than 3,600 in 2002 to about 1,400 now. Successive government initiatives have foundered on corruption; conflicts between poor local communities and the animals; the power of organised criminal smuggling tiger parts to east Asia, and simple administrative inertia. The population of snow leopards numbers between 100 and 200 – possibly less than a third of the total a decade ago, but the number of Asiatic lions has increased.

India’s last wild cheetahs are thought to have been shot by the Maharajah of Surguja in 1947.

Many experts believe that with the herds of deer and antelopes that once provided the cheetahs’ diet also long gone, the project is bound to fail.

Nature’s given us something we didn’t know how to keep. Why do we think we’ll keep it better now?

However, such objections were rejected by Ramesh. “Reintroduction is matter of national importance, as cheetah is the only mammal to [become] extinct from India,” he said.

Three sites – the Kuno-Palpur Wildlife Sanctuary and Nauradehi Wildlife Sanctuary, in the central state of Madhya Pradesh, and Shahgarh in the desert near Jaisalmer, Rajasthan – will aim to sustain a population of more than 100 cheetahs and create a thriving tourist business that benefits local communities.

“The return of the cheetah would make India the only country in the world to host six of the world’s eight large cats and the only one to have all the large cats of Asia,” MK Ranjitsinh, of Wildlife Trust of India, said.