Government officials in India recently revealed that plans are underway to reintroduce wild cheetahs to the country’s protected grasslands, where the animal has likely been extinct for over 60 years.
Cheetahs from Africa would be the likely imports, and millions of pounds are likely to be set aside for importing them and conserving them once they’ve arrived. A meeting of international experts will hash out the details of the budget this upcoming September in Rajasthan.
But with animal reserves currently in shoddy condition across India, is the reintroduction likely to be a success?
Asiatic cheetahs once roamed far and wide in India and the Middle East, though today only a few remain, mostly in the Kavir desert of Iran. Hunting and habitat loss have driven the subspecies to extinction everywhere else, and the last three known wild cheetahs in India were shot by the Maharajah of Surguja in 1947.
Unfortunately, the fall of the Shah in 1979 has stymied India’s hopes of importing a breeding pair from Iran. Since then, the Islamic Republic’s leaders have rejected all requests for an exchange, even for a sample of tissue to use in a cloning experiment. Thus, even with these latest plans at reintroduction, it’s the African rather than the Asiatic subspecies which may be roaming India’s grasslands moving into the future.
That’s only part of the debate which has surrounded these plans. Reintroducing an animal as delicate as the cheetah is no easy task; the animals have notoriously poor immune systems, high rates of cub mortality and demanding territorial habits. And India has a slipshod record with the conservation of currently existing big cats within their borders.
Most notably: conservation of the tiger. Of the 37 reserves currently set up to conserve the tiger, 16 are in dire straits– where they stand to lose all of their tigers if drastic actions are not pursued, and soon– and only 12 are considered in good shape. All in all, in the last 100 years India’s tiger population has shrunk from 40,000 to a mere 1,400.
The primary reason for the dismal record is that forest guards– who, among other things, protect the animals from poaching– are underpaid and undertrained. What reason is there to believe that cheetah conservation will fare any better?
The answer is likely to come in September when experts lobby for sufficient funds for the effort. The real measure of India’s willingness and fortitude to reestablish and protect a native population of cheetahs might be the price tag they put on it.
Sources: Times Online, Wildlife News
Image Credit: Tambako the Jaguar on Flickr under a Creative Commons License
About Bryan Nelson
The answer is no – just ask the lions at Gur.
Poor things don’t stand a chance
Cheetah reintroduction in India is a welcome news, but the introduction of another species of Cheetah(African) in India will not be of any conservation value. Moreover African cheetahs are not even a threatened species and are thriving well in their native territory.
It seems the whole plan is ill conceived, and Indian govt must not decide in haste.
Reintroduction another species will augment the problem of conservation in India, Where there is no assessment of what the alien species will have in the native eco-system. Instead sustained international effort must be exerted on Iran to send the Asiatic cheetahs to India, where other big cats are thriving well.
Already the world has to grapple with the introduction of alien species in Hawaiian Islands and Mauritius, which is causing havoc to indigenous species.
So introducing alien species must be studied thoroughly before being undertaken.
If Iran shares the cheetah with other countries, it will only augment its effort to save the species from extinction.