As 12 More Cheetahs Arrive in Kuno, Scientists Advising Govt Say Data Justifies Project

The scientists were responding to arguments made by another team last year that Project Cheetah was an “ill-advised conservation attempt” for several reasons.

New Delhi: Twelve cheetahs from South Africa arrived at Madhya Pradesh’s Kuno National Park on February 18, the second batch to arrive from Africa as part of Project Cheetah – which aims to introduce the big cat in India.

India was previously home to the species (albeit a different subspecies, the Asiatic cheetah) until the last wild cheetahs in the country were hunted to extinction.

Meanwhile, available data from studies “sufficiently support the experimental reintroduction of cheetahs into India”, scientists advising the Union government on the project said, in a correspondence published by the scientific journal Nature Ecology and Evolution. The scientists were responding to arguments made by another team that concluded that Project Cheetah was an “ill-advised conservation attempt” for several reasons – including its underestimation of Kuno’s cheetah carrying capacity.

First South African cheetahs arrive

The batch of twelve African cheetahs from South Africa touched down on Indian soil on February 18. The animals arrived at Gwalior in Madhya Pradesh from Johannesburg in South Africa at around 12 noon, said a government press release. The animals were then flown by helicopters to Kuno, around 230 kilometres away. The Indian Air Force conducted the translocation.

At Kuno, India’s Union environment minister Bhupender Yadav released the cheetahs into their enclosures. Also present were Madhya Pradesh chief minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan and Union agriculture and farmers welfare minister Narendra Singh Tomar.

Yadav called it “another milestone” for Project Cheetah. India has proven an example to the world by proving that an ecological wrong can be balanced by an action that is in ecological harmony, he said. 

“Under PM @narendramodi ji, India has shown the world how to move from ecological wrong to ecological harmony. The arrival of 12 cheetahs furthers that journey,” he tweeted. “In a splendid example of Jan Bhagidari, over 450 cheetha mitr (sic) are ensuring the cheetah acclimatize well in India.”

The Union government had earlier, on February 16, confirmed in a press release that the batch includes seven males and five females.

This is the second batch of cheetahs to arrive from Africa as part of Project Cheetah – the first, from Namibia, arrived in September 2022. The quarantine period of the first batch is nearly over, and scientists and officials of the forest department are monitoring various aspects including their behavior, said Yadav on February 18.

Many parts of India, specifically grassland habitats, were previously home to the Asiatic cheetah, Acinonyx jubatus venaticus.

The Project, however, has come under fire from experts including scientists for several reasons. One correspondence in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution in October last year said that Project Cheetah was an “ill-advised conservation attempt”. One reason was that the current action plan – the implementation template of Project Cheetah – overestimates cheetah carrying capacity in Kuno by not incorporating new research on cheetah home ranges and densities, according to the letter by scientists – including statistical ecologist Arjun Gopalaswamy – who have studied big cats including cheetahs in their wild habitats. As per the Plan, the 748 sq. km Kuno NP can accommodate 21 cheetahs across its territory: around three cheetahs per 100 sq. km. But recent research suggests that even in prime habitats, cheetah density is around one cheetah per 100 sq. km, Gopalaswamy and others said.

Other reasons they gave include the difference in reintroduction successes (and even available instances of these) in fenced versus unfenced reserves (such as those in India). The Indian government will have to “radically revise” its action plan before bringing in more cheetahs; the revision would need to incorporate contemporary research findings, and take steps to conserve India’s threatened savannahs and grasslands. If not, invest the funds in conserving the Asiatic cheetah in its native, remaining habitats in Iran, they recommended.

A cheetah after being released inside a special enclosure of the Kuno National Park in Madhya Pradesh, Saturday, September 17, 2022. Three of the eight cheetahs brought from Namibia were released as part of a programme to reintroduce the feline in India, seven decades after it was declared extinct in the country. Photo: PTI

A rebuttal

However, scientists who are currently involved in advising the Union government on Project Cheetah said they “respectfully disagree” with these points that Gopalaswamy and colleagues raised in a correspondence in the same journal on February 16.

The group of 12 scientists include Adrian Tordiff (lead author, Department of Paraclinical Sciences, Faculty of Veterinary Science, University of Pretoria, Pretoria, South Africa), Yadvendradev V. Jhala (professor at the Wildlife Institute of India), Vincent van der Merwe (The Metapopulation Initiative, Polokwane, South Africa) and Laurie Marker (of the Cheetah Conservation Fund, Namibia).

Regarding the chief point – concerning cheetah carrying capacity – the team “disagree” with Gopalaswamy, et al’s estimate of one cheetah per 100 sq km, they wrote, because cheetah densities are mostly dependent on the prey available in the landscape, which in turn depends on the vegetation in the area. “Historical cheetah population densities in East Africa were likely to have been higher before marked declines in their prey base and cheetahs are likely to have been more abundant in more productive areas of their historical range that have now been taken over by livestock farming,” they wrote.

They quoted the example of a reserve in southern Botswana – which has fences that permit the movement of predators – that recorded a density of around 5 cheetahs per 100 sq km. Therefore higher densities are possible, they wrote. But is the uncertainty here – regarding the differences in cheetah densities – due to the fewer occurrence of such wild cheetah populations in unfenced parks, or that studies on such populations are fewer?

Both, said Y.V. Jhala, who has been at the forefront of Project Cheetah and also led the drafting of the action plan. “Most well studied cheetahs are in the Serengeti-Mara system where most of the prey is migratory. In such systems cheetahs have a large range as they follow the migratory herds,” Jhala told The Wire.

Seventy cheetah reintroductions have occurred in southern Africa over the past two decades and these were mostly in fenced reserves, the scientists wrote. However, 22 cheetahs have been released into the unfenced Zambezi Delta in Mozambique since August 2021. And 36 cheetahs were successfully released onto farmlands, or unfenced or fenced reserves, in Namibia, and the animals had a high annual survival rate, they said.

The disease screening protocols and quarantine periods set up for the African cheetahs that arrive will address the issue of disease transmission, they wrote. All existing cheetah populations have a similar genetic distance (a measure of how species or subspecies differ from each other genetically) from the Asiatic cheetah, and low numbers and inbreeding in the last remaining populations of Asiatic cheetahs, in Iran, “exclude them as a potential source population for the Indian reintroduction”, the scientists wrote.

“In our view, the available data and argu­ments that we have laid out above sufficiently support the experimental reintroduction of cheetahs into India, and we look forward to assessing the outcome of the project over time,” the scientists wrote.

While the cheetahs’ role as an umbrella species (protecting which can conserve the larger ecosystem and landscape) is supported by theory, it will need to be evaluated after the cheetah is reintroduced and established in India, they added.