Hyderabad has a long and rocky relationship with cheetahs. The spotted cats were kept as pets by the historic city’s nobility as showpieces of royalty, and for the British colonialists, they defined India’s exotic wildlife. The last sighting of a cheetah in India was in Hyderabad in 1957, when the unfortunate animal fell into a well and could not be saved. In 2007, the Indian government set up a spanking new Laboratory for Conservation of Endangered Species (LACONES) on the outskirts of Hyderabad. The laboratory had the mandate of resurrecting extinct animals, including cheetahs.
While setting up the laboratory, Lalji Singh and S. Shivaji had cited success in artificial insemination in some animals. “Success has been reported using laparoscopic intrauterine (surgical) insemination in some of the wild animals such as tiger, cheetah, puma, snow leopard, and Eld’s deer,” they wrote in a filing with the Central Zoo Authority and the Ministry of Environment and Forests. However, the laboratory’s effort to secure germplasm from Iranian cheetahs, considered the closest genetic match to Indian cheetahs, for their breeding programme, did not succeed. The closest they came was to breeding mouse deer and releasing them in the Amrabad forest.
