South African government has signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) for translocation of 12 cheetahs to Madhya Pradesh’s Kuno National Park (KNP).
Key points
- The South African environment ministry signed the pact days after it was approved by President Cyril Ramaphosa.
- Kuno had earlier received eight cheetahs — three male and five female — from Namibia on Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s birthday on September 17.
- The second tranche of cheetahs is expected to arrive in the country by February-March, taking the total number of big cats from Africa in the national park to 20.
- These 12 cheetahs have been kept in quarantine facilities in two different locations — three in Phinda in KwaZulu-Natal province and nine in Rooiberg in Limpopo Province — since July 2022.
- According to the government, the Southern African cheetahs are found to be ancestral to all the other cheetah lineages…Hence, this should therefore be ideal (for reasons stated above) for India’s reintroduction programme.
- Cheetahs in India are being reintroduced under Project Cheetah, officially known as “Action Plan for Introduction of Cheetah in India”. Under the project, 50 Cheetahs will be reintroduced in India’s national parks over a time frame of five years.
Benefits of Cheetah restoration
- Cheetah restoration is part of a prototype or model for restoration of original cheetah habitats and their biodiversity.
- This will help to stem the degradation and rapid loss of biodiversity. Bringing back a top predator restores historic evolutionary balance resulting in cascading effects on various levels of the eco-system.
- Bringing the cheetah back is expected to have important conservation ramifications.
- The cheetah has been the evolutionary natural selection force that has shaped the adaptation of high speeds in Indian antelopes and gazelles.
- By restoring cheetah, we would also be able to save not only its prey base comprising certain threatened species, but also other endangered species of the grasslands / open forest eco-systems, some of which are on the brink of extinction.
About Cheetahs
- The cheetah was declared extinct from the country in 1952 because of habitat loss and poaching.
- Cheetahs can reach speeds of up to 113km/h, making them the world’s fastest land animal.
- The cheetah is the only large carnivore that got completely wiped out from India, mainly due to over-hunting and habitat loss.
- The last spotted feline died in 1948 in the Sal forests of Chhattisgarh’s Koriya district.
- Only about 7,000 cheetahs remain in the wild worldwide. African Cheetah is classified as a vulnerable species under the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) red list of threatened species.
- Namibia has the world’s largest population of cheetahs.
- The Asiatic cheetah, which could once be found in regions stretching from the Arabian peninsula to Afghanistan, is a critically endangered species and now only exists in Iran. It is estimated that only 12 cats are still alive.
