AIR Spotlight: Reintroduction of Cheetahs in India

AIR Spotlight is an insightful program featured daily on the All India Radio Newsonair. In this program, many eminent panellists discuss issues of importance which can be quite helpful in IAS exam preparation. This article features a discussion on the Central Vista Project and its features.

Participants:

• Dr C K Varshney, Environmentalist 
• Chetan Chauhan, Journalist

Context:

• Eight Cheetahs from Namibia would be relocated in Kuno National Park, Madhya Pradesh as part of an international translocation project.
• This is being labelled as a significant conservation project given that this move will help in establishing a local Cheetah population within India after they reportedly went extinct in 1952.

Precautions to be taken in the execution of the project:

• Selecting of proper individuals for the translocation project remains the most crucial aspect for the success of the project. Healthy and disease free individuals in their reproductive age and full of vitality should be selected.
• All individuals need to be selected from wild and not those raised in zoos. This is crucial given that the success rate of translocation of tigers raised in captivity and then translocated to wild has been low.
• The selected individuals need to be quarantined for at least a month and observed for any signs of diseases.
• Given that the animals will have to travel a long distance both by road and air, adequate measures need to be taken to ensure that this travel does not affect their well-being. They have to be suitably tranquilized.
• Given that the climate and environment into which the cheetahs would be translocated would be different from their source place, they could be prone to new diseases in the translocated place. Hence the translocated animals should be kept under surveillance and monitored for an extended period of time by collaring each of the translocated animals.
• Leopards would be a major competitor to the Cheetahs in Kuno National Park. Hence there is the need for what is termed as a soft introduction. This would include having a special enclosure for the cheetah with sufficient area, free from any competitors.
• Given that the reintroduced Cheetah population will remain in a protected environment for an extended period of time, sufficient measures should be taken to slowly but surely introduce them to the wild. This will ensure their adaptation to the local wildlife in a more effective way.

Apprehensions/challenges regarding the project and counter-arguments:

• The grasslands in Kuno would be much smaller as compared to what where available in the source country. This could constrict the space available for the cheetahs to move around.
  • Though the selected place for reintroduction is small, it has a more than sufficient prey population to support the translocated cheetahs. Large number of ungulates are available in the National Park with Sambhar and Cheethal amounting to around 15000- 20000 members.
• Given the change in both environment and habitat, breeding in between the translocated cheetah population would remain a challenge. Without breeding this whole project would be treated as a failure.
  • Cheetahs are known to be highly adaptable animals. In a previous such attempt to translocate Cheetahs from South Africa to Malawi, Cheetahs have exhibited their high temperature tolerance range.

Read previous AIR Spotlight articles in the link.

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