Experts fear death of African cheetahs in Kuno

Top wildlife biologists on Wednesday said they fear death of African cheetahs due to human-cheetah conflict that may arise from the unscientific approach adopted by the Union government to introduce them in the Kuno Palpur sanctuary in Madhya Pradesh.

“The action plan appears to have substantially over-estimated cheetah carrying capacity at the first release site. We anticipate that neither Kuno National Park, which is only 748 sq km in area, unfenced, harbouring about 500 feral cattle and surrounded by a forested landscape with 169 human settlements nor the other landscapes considered are of the size and quality to permit self-sustaining and genetically viable cheetah populations,” they said. “Adopting such a speculative and unscientific approach will lead to human–cheetah conflicts, death of the introduced cheetahs or both, and will undermine other science-based species recovery efforts, both globally and within India.”

Four Bengaluru-based biologists, including noted tiger expert Ullas Karanth from the Centre for Wildlife Studies, teamed up with colleagues from Europe, Australia and South Africa to share their concerns on the Union environment ministry’s Rs 90 crore African cheetah introduction programme that was flagged off by Prime Minister Narendra Modi on his birthday last month.

Sharing their views in a correspondence published in Nature Ecology and Evolution, the scientists said India’s plan was based on three unsubstantiated claims: (1) that cheetahs have run out of space in Africa, (2) that India currently has sufficient and suitable space for them and (3) that conservation translocations have been successful in wild cheetah range restoration efforts.

The action plan also speculated that such a translocation would trigger conservation of grassland and open forest ecosystems in India.

“The plan ignores crucial scientific findings on free-ranging cheetahs. This can prove to be a costly mistake because the cheetah carrying capacities assumed in the plan relies entirely on projections made from a single, likely flawed, density estimate from Namibia from over a decade ago,” said Arjun Gopalaswamy, Founder and Chief Scientist, Carnassials Global (India), the lead author of this letter.

A recent study of a free-ranging cheetah population in the prey-rich Maasai Mara landscape in Kenya offers crucial insights. The study revealed even in such large, prey-rich landscapes (a 2,400 sq km area surrounded by more than 20,000 sq km of cheetah habitat), cheetahs are characterised by disproportionately large home range sizes (over 750 sq km) and very low population densities (about one cheetah per 100 sq km).

This bolsters the view that cheetah populations can be highly sensitive to offtakes and thereby not recommended as sources for translocation programmes. But Indian planners ignored the study.

The scientists pointed out it would be necessary to distinguish free-ranging from fenced-in cheetahs. In southern Africa certain small, fenced reserves harbour cheetahs at densities that are over 15 times higher than their natural, free-ranging counterparts.

These ‘surplus’ cheetahs are often translocated, usually between fenced reserves. The eight cheetahs that were recently transported from Namibia to India were sourced from one such confined space.

"Although there have been reported reintroduction successes of such fenced-in cheetahs into other fenced areas or reinforcement successes into known populations, we know of no reintroduction success into an unfenced area yet, even within Africa," they wrote in the journal.

Ravi Chellam, CEO of Metastring Foundation and Abi Tamim Vanak, a Senior Fellow at the Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment are the other two Bangalorean team members who question the motivation for such a hasty and hurried transportation of cheetahs from Africa to India.