Will African cheetahs survive the Indian wild?
BRINGING the cheetah back to India 70 years after the animal became extinct in the country seems an exciting project.
As part of the experiment, eight cheetahs were tranquilised and transported on a non-stop flight from Namibia last week. They will gradually be released in Madhya Pradesh’s Kuno National Park, which is spread over 748 sq km.
The last cheetahs in the wild in India were recorded in 1948, when three were shot in the Sal forests in Chhattisgarh’s Koriya district. There were a few sporadic reports of sightings from the central and Deccan regions until the mid-1970s.
However, wildlife expert Valmik Thapar is doubtful if the rewilding will work. “We do not have the habitat or prey species for wild, free-roaming cheetahs,” he said. “The authorities have no experience or understanding of cheetahs in the wild. African cheetahs, if released into Kuno, will survive only in the short term and that too if frequently baited.”
The London-based painter Lincoln Seligman has done numerous paintings of cheetahs.
My mother used to tell us tales of tigers and other wild animals roaming the back garden of her home in the Goalpara village of Assam when she was a little girl. For my 21st, she urged me to visit Goalpara where I, too, was born. She asked me to look up Sultan, the village hunter, who was summoned whenever a tiger sneaked into someone’s shop or the paddy godown. He was by now an old man. He met me in his front room where the walls were covered with the mounted heads of beasts he had been forced to shoot.
Seeing me look over his shoulder, he said: “There are 73 tigers and 13 cheetahs.”
The Namibian cheetahs are possibly a metaphor for humans being introduced to distant planets one day.