One year of #cheetah in #india ..

In the era of humans, the Anthropocene, humans are changing this planet for making it better and better for themselves and less and less important for the other biodiversity which co-inhabits the planet with the humans. So, the extinction crisis caused by humans is akin to the mass extinction crisis which happened 65 million years ago, the era of the dinosaurs. That was caused by the strike of a meteorite on this planet. And today, humans have replaced the impact of that meteorite. But luckily for us, humans are also endowed with the intellect to redress our actions on this planet. And one way we do this is to bring back species which have been made extinct by humans. In India, cheetah is the only large carnivore that has been made extinct by human actions after India became independent. Cheetah was declared extinct in 1948. But sightings continued till the 1960s. In fact, cheetahs were seen in Afghanistan till the 1970s. So, cheetah has been a recent species that has been made extinct by over-hunting and over-harvesting. Societies which have the economic ability, the ethical background to do things right and the scientific acumen to achieve this often use reintroduction of species to re-wild this planet. Bringing back the cheetah is one of this noble gestures of society wherein we bring back an extinct species to re-wild the planet and create intact ecosystems. On 17th of September, the Prime Minister of India released cheetahs which were brought in from Namibia by me and my team. These cheetahs were in quarantine in Namibia for a period of one month. Some of them were wild-caught, others from large game reserves and some of them were wild orphans which were hand-reared in captivity. But were capable of contributing to a breeding population in India. So, these cheetahs, three of them were released by the Prime Minister and this was after 75 years of extinction that the animal set foot on the Indian soil. That was the beginning of an era of the reintroduction of a first reintroduction which is transcontinental of a large carnivore in the planet. India signed a memorandum of understanding with the government of Namibia and subsequently with the government of South Africa to import wild cheetah into India. The reason why we chose the Southern African nations for importing cheetah as a source population was because these cheetah are genetically the most diverse. The ancestors of all other cheetah subspecies as well as that is the only population in the world which can actually allow or permit a harvest without hurting the source population. So, we had a continuous source of animals which could be brought in from these two countries. And that was a very important criteria because all other subspecies of cheetahs which are found in Northern Africa, in Central Africa, in Eastern Africa and Southern Africa are genetically equidistant from the extinct Asiatic cheetah. The only population of Asiatic cheetah survives in Iran which is close to about 12 to 15 individuals and you cannot do a reintroduction with such a small number. So, we need at least anywhere between 50 to 75 individuals to be brought into this country in India from Southern Africa over the period of next 10 years. There are set guidelines by the IUCN on how to do conservation translocations. And in this case we are bringing in a different subspecies of Asinonyx jubatus to replace the Asiatic cheetah because there is no chance of getting the Asiatic cheetah back into its original range. In this case you need to ensure that when we bring in animals you don't bring in diseases from Africa into India. And the animals which come in from Africa are immune to the indigenous diseases of India. For that they have to undergo a quarantine period in Africa, in India for about one month each and undergo blood tests as well as vaccination programs. So that the animals, the cheetah are themselves immune and they don't bring in any diseases. This was done for both the animals of Namibia as well as Southern Africa. During the quarantine period these cheetah are kept under observations in small electrified enclosures called bomas. And subsequent after the quarantine period is over they are released in a large boma which is about five square kilometers stocked with native prey species. Which was cheetal and neelgai and some sambar and wild pigs. So these cheetah it was believed will take some time to actually learn to hunt Indian prey because they've been hunting antelope in Africa. However they took to hunting Indian prey like fish to water and the first day most of these cheetahs were released in the larger boma. They all made kills of cheetal deer and have successfully done so over the past few months. And there's been very little need to feed them artificially. These cheetahs were then released, many of them were released from these five square kilometer large enclosure into free-ranging conditions in Kuno National Park in central India in Madhya Pradesh. As animals which would free-range and do what they do what animals do naturally. Free-ranging cheetahs also did quite well. There were critics who said that these cheetah would get killed by leopards. The leopard density in Kuno is very high about probably the highest in the world about 22 leopards per hundred square kilometer. But we did not find any incident of any injury to the cheetahs which were released in free-ranging conditions outside of the electrified boma. These cheetah did not have to be fed on a regular basis. I think there was only one or two supplementations which were required over a period of over a hundred cheetah days when these animals were out. And the animals were not killed by poachers nor were they snared or the village dogs attacking them or killing them. None of the animals died due to road hits. We lost our cheetah to other causes which was unexpected and probably we could have done without. And these were mostly management related. Some of the animals died due to stress and precipitation of their preconditions of health. One of them had a kidney problem which was precipitated due to starvation and the symptoms came up and she died. One female got killed by two males. It was a wrong pairing when the animals were paired from the same game reserve into the same boma and the monitoring was not there. These males were quite vicious and the female was naive to sex. She was the first time breeder and there was no place for her to get away because the boma was fenced. And the female got killed in the process because probably she was not an oestrus at that point in time. These two deaths and the deaths of three cubs which died out of malnourishment I would say was a very hard and difficult learning experience for us which could have been done without for the project. It was a setback for the project. Most of the animals died due to something known as septicemia. What had happened was that these animals are coming from the southern hemisphere at a very south latitude of southern Africa where the winters are quite cold and most of them are dry. So when animals were brought in from southern Africa into India which is in the northern hemisphere north of the Tropic of Cancer these animals were exported to a totally different season from winter into the middle of summer and on top of that monsoon. The southern African regions from where these cheetah comes the rainfall is there but it is sporadic and in showers and thundershowers. They do not experience continuous rain for several days like we do in India. So the combination of a thick winter coat combined with heavy rainfall made the skin extremely delicate and soggy. The collars which they were wearing on the neck aggravated the situation by having a dark object which did not allow evaporation from the skin. When cheetahs feel itchy on such skin and they scratch their nails actually crack the skin because the skin is very papery and moist. There are lots of flies in the monsoon abounding there and they come and lay eggs on the skin where the cheetah can't lick. You have maggots penetrate the skin, bacterial infection and animals die due to bud poisoning or septicemia. We lost a lot of animals due to septicemia. This was not expected by anybody or not foreseen by anybody. Unfortunately these animals would have gone through a lot of trauma for several days before septicemia seized in. They would have scratched, shaken their heads and been miserable. Unfortunately the team who was monitoring this did not have the experience to pick up these behavioral traits. And if they were treated in time we could have saved these animals from death. So this has been a major loss to the project. It's a setback but it is not a cause of failure. We can easily come back with more animals and the important part is that these animals did not succumb to mortalities which we had envisioned which were likely to be limiting for the project. That was snaring, leopards, dogs, road kills and diseases. This did not operate in the population. None of the cheetahs died because of these causes. So there is very high hope for the success of this project provided the government of India allocates appropriate fund for the long term. And we create cheetah populations in three to five different populations and manage them as one population. That is called a metapopulation management because none of the sites by themselves is viable in the long term. You need anywhere between 50 to 75 cheetah for a population to be viable. And who know can at best hold 20 animals and the larger landscape close to about 30-35. But that by itself considering all the mortality factors which may operate and the stochasticity in the system may not be viable. And therefore we need Noradehi, we need Gandhisagar, we need Mukundra, we need Shahagad and many others in the historical range of the cheetah where it can be established and then managed together initially as artificially as a metapopulation. Once the cheetah populations build up to over 100-200 animals then it is possible that these animals will move across landscapes and exchange genetic material by themselves and artificial management may not be required. But that is way ahead in the future. So the cheetah is poised to come back. These are teething problems for the project and we look forward to having cheetah repopulate most of India within its historical range. Thank you.