‘Don’t send SA cheetahs to India’
Conservationists argue the small unfenced area is unsuitable for African cheetahs, and dangerous
South Africa’s involvement in a controversial project to send an initial batch of 12 African cheetahs to India is fraught with problems, conservationists warn. Next month, the big cats from South Africa are expected to join eight cheetahs that were flown from Namibia to India earlier this month, more than 70 years after its Asiatic cheetah was declared extinct.
The Namibian cheetahs — five females and three males — were introduced to the Kuno National Park to celebrate Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s birthday.
The introduction of African cheetahs is being done under the auspices of Project Cheetah, which the Indian government has billed as “the first inter-continental large wild carnivore translocation project”.
At the release of the Namibian cheetahs, Modi said the introduction of the cheetahs “will help restore open forest and grassland ecosystems”. This will help conserve biodiversity and enhance services like water security, carbon sequestration and soil moisture conservation, benefiting society at large and wildlife conservation. It will also lead to “livelihood opportunities for the community through eco-development and ecotourism activities”.
Conservation experts in India and South Africa are opposed to moving the cheetahs to India and have strongly condemned it.
No MOU – yet
In July, a request was made to the department of forestry, fisheries and the environment to supply India with 12 cheetahs “as part of their first reintroduction attempt”.
The proposed relocation date for the shipment was due to coincide with India’s Independence Day in August. South Africa, however, has not yet signed off on the deal.
“The department cannot comment on the memorandum of understanding (MOU) and related processes at this stage,” said Albi Modise, spokesperson for the department. Earlier this month, the department’s team visited India’s Kuno National Park.
Vincent van der Merwe, manager of the Metapopulation Initiative, is working on the project with the University of Pretoria, the Wildlife Institute of India and the National Tiger Conservation Authority.
“In our exchanges with these department officials [who visited Kuno], they appear supportive of the reintroduction and are making a concerted effort to fast-track the MOU. Government Mous take time, which is a little frustrating,” he said.
The founder cheetah population from South Africa is due to arrive at Kuno late this month, “in time to experience the tail end of the monsoon while still in holding bomas”, he said. This was to familiarise them with tropical rain, preparing them for future exposure in freeranging conditions. Now they are expected to be released into Kuno in late October, at the onset of the dry season.
Loss of credibility
Gus Mills, who has conducted research on African carnivores for over 40 years with Sanparks, described the translocation project as “crazy” and as “being driven by politicians” in India.
“The whole thing is built on such an unscientific, unsustainable, nonsensical basis. Firstly, it’s the wrong subspecies. We’re bringing cheetahs from the southern tip of Africa, which is as far away from India as you get in cheetah ranges, and trying to introduce them to this environment, which from a biodiversity aspect is very bad.”
The project is also “getting in the way” of a “long-standing” high court judgment in India that Asiatic lions, and not African cheetahs, be moved to Kuno. Kuno is too small, he said.
“In the best habitats of cheetahs, like the Serengeti and the Kalahari, you get about one cheetah per 100 square kilometres so the carrying capacity [in Kuno] is not going to be able to ever sustain a viable population.”
He said South Africa would lose a lot of credibility in the scientific conservation world if it agreed to the project. “There are many eminent scientists who are against it.”
Strong opposition
The project has also drawn strong opposition from conservationists in India, who have described it as a “vanity project” and a waste of taxpayers’ money. The country, they say, does not have the habitat or prey species to support viable populations of wild, free-roaming African cheetahs.
Wildlife biologist and conservation scientist Ravi Chellam said: “The plan is to translocate cheetahs from fenced reserves within South Africa and release them into an extremely small unfenced reserve, Kuno, which is only 748km2 in an area with 169 villages in the larger landscape in which Kuno is located.
“Free-ranging cheetahs are known to have home ranges larger than what the unfenced park can support. Given the propensity of cheetahs to come into conflict with humans, why is South Africa supporting this idea?”
Recipe for disaster
Jan Venter, the head of department and associate professor at the department of conservation management at Nelson Mandela University, foresees a “recipe for potential disaster”.
“Cheetahs roam quite widely and I think if you have a place that size, especially surrounded by communities that have livestock, it’s just a recipe for potential conflict. We’re very good at fencing places in South Africa and managing predators in confined spaces but it’s a different ball game if there is no fence.”
If “this blows up into a mess”, Venter said “it would be quite an embarrassment” for South Africa. The chance of failure is very high.”
But Van der Merwe said Kuno has sufficient prey and suitable habitat and that all founder cheetahs have no history of taking livestock.
“There is potential for humanwildlife conflict in the buffer zone surrounding Kuno … as well as sheep and goat farming areas.”
Long-term conservation
The “proposed reintroduction” is a long-term conservation effort, he said. “Our initial cheetah reintroduction efforts in South Africa took decades to get it right. Almost 200 cheetahs sourced from Namibia were lost in the process.
“Valuable lessons were learnt”, and reintroduction techniques have been refined, he said. “Since 2011, we have coordinated 30 successful reintroductions, while only two have failed. We expect similar losses in India initially, and regular supplementation from the South Africa metapopulation will be key to the long-term success of the project.”
South Africa has a growing wild cheetah population and “unless we supply animals for reintroduction elsewhere, we are going to initiate costly and invasive contraception programmes” or even euthanasia.
“We will need to supplement India with a small number of individuals every year, until they’ve established a sustainable metapopulation of their own,” he said.
But Mills asked: “How many cheetahs are going to die? If they’re thinking of bringing 500 to 1 000 cheetahs and they admit that a lot of cheetahs are going to die, from a welfare issue, can you just throw hundreds of cheetahs and let them die in an experiment?”