Cheetahs ‘will run again’ in India after 70 years
NEW DELHI — Seven decades after cheetahs died out in India, they’re back.
Eight big cats from Namibia made the long trek Saturday in a chartered cargo flight to the northern Indian city of Gwalior, part of an ambitious and hotly contested plan to reintroduce cheetahs to the South Asian country.
Then they were moved to their new home: a sprawling national park in the heart of India where scientists hope the world’s fastest land animal will roam again.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi released the cats into their enclosure Saturday morning. The cats emerged from their cage, tentatively at first while continuously scanning their new surroundings.
“When the cheetah will run again … grasslands will be restored, biodiversity will increase and eco-tourism will get a boost,” said Modi.
Cheetahs were once widespread in India and became extinct in 1952 from hunting and loss of habitat. They remain the first and only predator to die out since India’s independence in 1947. India hopes importing African cheetahs will aid efforts to conserve the country’s threatened and largely neglected grasslands.
There are less than 7,000 adult cheetahs left in the wild globally, and they now inhabit less than 9 percent of their original range. Shrinking habitat, due to the increasing human population and climate change, is a huge threat and India’s grasslands and forests could offer “appropriate” homes for the big cat, said Laurie Marker, of the Cheetah Conservation Fund, an advocacy and research group assisting in bringing the cats to India.
“To save cheetahs from extinction, we need to create permanent places for them on earth,” she said.
Some experts are more cautious.
There could be “cascading and unintended consequences” when a new animal is brought to the mix, said Mayukh Chatterjee of the International Union for Conservation of Nature.
With cheetahs, there are questions about how their presence would affect other carnivores like striped hyenas, or even prey like birds.
“The question remains: How well it’s done,” he said.
The initial eight cheetahs from Namibia will be quarantined at a facility in the national park and monitored for a month to make sure they’re not carrying pests. Then they will be released into a larger enclosure in the park to help them get used to their new environment.
The cheetahs will be fitted with tracking collars and released into the national park in about two months. Their movements will be tracked routinely, but for the most part, they’ll be on their own.