After 70 years Cheetah makes a comeback in India

 In India seven decades after cheetahs died out, they’re back.

On Saturday in a chartered cargo flight to the northern Indian city of Gwalior eight big cats from Namibia made the long trek to the South Asian country to reintroduce cheetahs, part of an ambitious and hotly contested plan.

In the heart of India is a sprawling national park where scientists hope the world’s fastest land animal will roam again, then they are moved to their new home.

On Saturday morning Narendra Modi, Indian Prime Minister, released the cats into their enclosure. The cats emerged from their cage, tentatively while continuously scanning their new surroundings at first.

“When the cheetah will run again then the grasslands will be restored, biodiversity will increase and eco-tourism will get a boost”, Modi said.

In India cheetahs were once widespread and became extinct from hunting and loss of habitat in 1952. Since India’s independence in 1947 they remain the first and only predator to die out. To conserve the country’s threatened and largely neglected grasslands India hopes importing African cheetahs will aid efforts.

Laurie Marker, of the Cheetah Conservation Fund, an advocacy and research group assisting in bringing the cats to India said that in the wild globally there are less than 7,000 adult cheetahs left, and of their original range they now inhabit less than 9%. 

Shrinking habitat is a huge threat due to the increasing human population and climate change, and for the big cat forests India’s grasslands could offer “appropriate” homes.

“We need to create permanent places for them on earth to save cheetahs from extinction”, she said.

In most countries Cheetah populations are declining, where the cats have run out of space, an exception to this is South Africa. Indian forests could offer these cats space to thrive, experts hope. 

In quarantine in South Africa there are currently a dozen cheetahs, and at the Kuno National Park they are expected to arrive soon. 

Earlier this month, in South Africa four cheetahs were captured at reserves and flown to Mozambique, earlier this month, where the cheetah population has drastically declined.

Mayukh Chatterjee of the International Union for Conservation of Nature, said that there could be “cascading and unintended consequences” when a new animal is brought to the mix.

For example, with people sharing the same space a tiger population boom in India has led to more conflict. Other carnivores about how their presence would affect there are questions like striped hyenas, or even prey like birds, with cheetahs.

“The question remains, he said that: How well it’s done”.

The initial eight cheetahs will be quarantined at a facility in the national park and monitored for a month from Namibia to make sure they’re not carrying pests. 

Into a larger enclosure in the park they will be released to help them get used to their new environment. Such as spotted deer and antelope the enclosures contain natural prey, which scientists hope they’ll learn to hunt and are designed to prevent other predators like bears or leopards from getting in.

The cheetahs will be fitted with tracking collars and released into the national park in about two months. Routinely, their movements will be tracked, but for the most part, they’ll be on their own.

According to scientists, the reserve is big enough to hold 21 cheetahs and if they were to establish territories and breed, they could spread to other interconnected grasslands and forests that can house another dozen cheetahs.

With a few hundred families still residing on the fringes of the park there is only one village. They’d be moved soon, Indian officials said, and due to cheetahs any livestock loss will be compensated. 

Over five years the project is estimated to cost $11.5 million, including $6.3 million that will be paid for by state-owned Indian Oil.

In the making the continent-to-continent relocation has been decades. Asiatic cheetahs were the cats that originally roamed India, genetically distinct cousins of those that live in Africa and whose range stretched to Saudi Arabia.

To bring in Asiatic cheetahs India had hoped, but in Iran only a few dozen of these survive and to move that population is too vulnerable.

In India many obstacles remain, including the presence of other predators like leopards that may compete with cheetahs, said conservation geneticist Pamela Burger of University of Veterinary Medicine in Vienna.

She said “In creating new sites where the outcome is questionable it would be better to conserve them now where they are than to put effort”.

With the project a veterinary wildlife specialist from South Africa associated, Dr. Adrian Tordiffe, said the animals need a helping hand. In many African countries he added that conservation efforts hadn’t been as successful, where strict conservation laws have preserved big cat populations unlike in India.

“We cannot sit back and hope that species like the cheetah will survive on their own without our help”, he said.

From the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education the Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support. For all content the AP is solely responsible for all content.

Source:- https://usstudieson.com/after-70-years-cheetah-makes-a-comeback-in-india/