Eight cheetahs, which were brought from Namibia to India and released in Madhya Pradesh’s Kuno National Park three months ago, may get 12 new “friends” from South Africa by mid-February, taking the total number of felines to 20 in the region.
India and South Africa recently signed a pact as a part of the former’s much-ambitious Cheetah reintroduction programme. The eight big cats brought in September last year from Namibia are doing fine and making kills on their own, said the State officials.
According to reports, South Africa has donated 12 big cats to India. But India has to pay USD 3,000 for the capture of every cheetah to the African nation before they are translocated. Sources said that the MP Wildlife Department has already set up 10 quarantine facilities (enclosures) for them. In two of these facilities, two pairs of cheetah brothers would be kept.
Due to the delay in the signing of the MoU for the intercontinental translocation of these big cats, some experts had last month expressed concern over the health of the South African cheetahs as these animals have been quarantined there since July 15. As a result of long quarantine, these animals might have lost their fitness, they had feared.
Prolonged quarantine could be taking a toll on the health of these big cats, who are slated to join the eight cheetahs imported from Namibia and released into the KNP in Sheopur district mid-September, as per the experts. Experts said that a delegation from South Africa visited the KNP in early September to see arrangements at the wildlife sanctuary for housing the world’s fastest land mammals.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi, on his 72nd birthday on September 17, had released eight cheetahs flown in from Namibia into the KNP amid a lot of fanfare, setting the ball rolling for the revival of their population in India where these distinctively spotted cat species became extinct seven decades ago.
These fastest land animals from Namibia - five females and three males - are currently in hunting enclosures at the park before their full release into the wild. The last cheetah died in India in Koriya district of present-day Chhattisgarh in 1947 and the big cat species was declared extinct in 1952. Former Union Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh had initiated “Project Cheetah” in 2009.