Five more cheetahs (three females and two males) will be released from the acclimatisation camps at the Kuno National Park (KNP) into “free-roaming conditions” before the onset of the monsoon rains in June, the Union Environment Ministry said in a statement on Monday.
The statement was based on a report submitted by an expert committee to the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA), which is the nodal body for Project Cheetah. The committee consisted of Adrian Tordiffe, Veterinary Wildlife Specialist, University of Pretoria, South Africa; Vincent van der Merwe, Manager, Cheetah Metapopulation Project, South Africa; Qamar Qureshi, Lead Scientist, Wildlife Institute of India, Dehradun, and Amit Mallick, Inspector General of Forests, NTCA. They visited the KNP on April 30, 2023 and reviewed the current status of the Project Cheetah.
Twenty cheetahs have been brought from Namibia and South Africa since September 2022 as part of translocation programme to reintroduce the wild cat into Indian habitat. As part of their acclimatisation, the animals were housed in special enclosures. Two of the animals, however, have died — one from a kidney infection and one from heart failure, following, possibly, a strenuous hunt. The long-term plan to acclimatise the animals to Indian conditions is to gradually release the animals into the wild — though all the animals are radio-collared and the Madhya Pradesh State wildlife officials are tracking their movement — and keep adding more animals from Africa until a sizeable self-sustaining population is established in a decade or so, while accounting for natural mortality and acclimatisation-related challenges. So far, four of the cheetahs had already been released into the wild — with one of them even ranging outside the Kuno National Park and venturing into farms in Uttar Pradesh and having to be tranquillised and returned to the sanctuary.
