Claws out over project sending Southern African cheetahs to India

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It’s being touted as the first intercontinental species “reintroduction” of its kind — sending Southern African cheetahs to India 70 years after its Asiastic cheetah was declared extinct.

Last week, India and Namibia signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) that will see eight of its cheetahs sent to Kuno next month, marking India’s 75th Independence Day celebrations.

According to Vincent van der Merwe, who manages the cheetah metapopulation in South Africa, the proposed relocation date for South Africa’s first batch of cheetahs is early to mid-August, prior to India’s Independence Day.

‘Special significance’

In a statement on the MoU, the Indian ministry of environment, forest and climate change described how cheetahs “have very special significance for the national conservation ethic and ethos”.

Cheetah restoration, it said, will be part of a prototype for restoration of original cheetah habitats and their biodiversity, helping to stem the degradation and rapid loss of biodiversity.

“The main goal is to establish [a] viable cheetah metapopulation in India that allows the cheetah to perform its functional role as a top predator and provides space for the expansion of the cheetah within its historical range thereby contributing to its global conservation efforts,” it said. The current carrying capacity for Kuno National Park is 21 cheetahs but, once restored, the larger landscape can hold about 36 cheetahs.

The project has, however, drawn widespread controversy from Indian wildlife experts, who have described it as a “waste of taxpayers money” and “nothing more than a poorly-conceived vanity project”.

‘Exports are key’

The International Union for Conservation of Nature estimates there are fewer than 7 000 wild cheetahs left in the world. Tordiffe said the cheetahs in at least 50 small private and state-owned reserves in South Africa are the only population of cheetahs in the world that is growing. All others are either stable or in decline. “Our biggest problem is in these small reserves in South Africa where we’ve got this growing population … The population in these small reserves is over 500 cheetahs. But we don’t have any new small reserves coming onboard in South Africa that are wanting cheetahs. So there is nowhere to take this growing population.“From South Africa’s side, we need new space to expand a very healthy growing population into where they’re going to be protected. India offers an absolutely wonderful opportunity for that.”  The alternative is to start putting many cheetahs in small reserves on contraceptives “because we’ve got nowhere to go with them. That would be a tragedy.”

Although there might be small genetic differences between the Southern African cheetah and the Asiatic cheetah — only 20 remain in Iran — their function within an ecosystem is likely to be identical, he said.

Cat fight

Bangalore-based wildlife biologist and conservation scientist Ravi Chellam maintains, however, that the cheetah project has very limited conservation value. “It will turn out to be a very expensive mistake,” he said of the project, which “diverts attention and drains already scarce conservation resources from much higher priority conservation needs of India”.

This includes the long-delayed translocation of Asiatic lions, which was ordered by the Supreme Court in 2013, to Kuno. The endangered lions are restricted to a single isolated population in and around Gir forest in Gujarat and are the world’s only population of the subspecies. 

“How many cheetahs are there in the world, that too in multiple sites and you’re dealing with only about 700 Asiatic lions,” he said, explaining how there is no question of the introduced cheetahs playing the functional role of a top predator at scale, unlike the lions. “To save African cheetahs, take them to India. At what cost? When did African conservation priorities trump Indian conservation priorities?”

Chellam is concerned the African cheetahs will have no experience of hunting Indian deer, and that the introduced cheetah population is very unlikely to ever become self-sustaining. “It will require intensive management and monitoring. This will be very expensive and also uncertain in the long-term.”

The sites in which the cheetah will be introduced in Kuno “would largely end up as “glorified safari parks” rather than wild landscapes with self-sustaining populations, he said.

According to Van der Merwe, lion and cheetah have evolved together for millions of years and co-exist across the current and historical distribution range. “There should not be lion only, or cheetah only reserves, as such setups will never truly represent the natural heritage that should be present in these protected areas. Both lion and cheetahs should be reintroduced into Kuno, as we have done here in many South African reserves.”

Introducing the animals into Kuno could never be self-sustaining” in the long term, unless it forms part of a larger managed metapopulation of cheetahs, he said. “Intensive management and monitoring will absolutely be required. Large predator populations persist only in small and isolated remnant patches of natural habitat. They will have to be managed to prevent inbreeding, overpopulation, or local extinction.”  

‘Not viable’

Valmik Thapar, an Indian naturalist, conservationist and author, has visited Africa every year, for a month, during the last 20 years. “I must have seen and watched the behaviour of nearly 400 different cheetahs in the wild … in the Serengeti,” he said. 

“Having traversed the length and breadth of this country and knowing what cheetahs enjoy in terms of their habitat and their food, there is no viability to reintroduce any kind of cheetah, and this is the African cheetah, in India, in a wild state because we don’t have the habitat or the prey.”

India never had a free-ranging population of thousands of cheetahs, he said. “They’re talking about it going extinct 70 years ago. That’s nonsense because that was a cheetah killed, which was probably a Marajah’s pet cheetah that ran wild because we used to import cheetahs from Africa for our kings, we used to course with them on leashes and chains to hunt little herds of blackbuck. And they were always stabled in the palace … 

“If you go back 250 years, we have no record and I’ve gone into the history of this … therefore for a long time cheetahs were not allowed to come to India because it meant there was no viability. Now suddenly it needs to become a fashion that we need to show the world that we are reintroducing the cheetah … an African cheetah in India.”

‘Predator-savvy’

Van der Merwe’s job was to identify a suitable founder population of 12 cheetahs for relocation to India. “A deliberate attempt was to identify young, ecologically functional, predator-savvy founder cheetahs,” he said. 

“When released into Kuno, these cheetahs will have to fend for themselves in an environment where competing predators such as leopards, wolves and sloth bears will be out to get them. The animals were selected from some of South Africa’s “very best” private game reserves: Tswalu, Phinda, Welgevonden and Mapesu.

Kuno, an unfenced open system national park, is well protected with healthy prey populations. “It is a sizable, protected area that has the ecological capacity to sustain up to 40 cheetahs.” 

There are no major differences between the savannas of Africa and India and habitat is not a limiting factor. “Apart from dense forest, extreme mountains, and desert, our metapopulation cheetahs persist in a wide variety of biomes including semi-desert, thicket, sand forest, savanna and grassland.”

Eight a year

South Africa will send 12 cheetahs initially, and thereafter eight every year, according to Van der Merwe, who described cheetahs as high value tourism animals. 

Albi Modise, the spokesperson for the department of forestry, fisheries and the environment, said: “The project is under negotiation and no final agreement has been signed between South Africa and India for the translocation of cheetah.”

Van der Merwe said: “This reintroduction is the culmination of 10 years of hard work, involving 376 cheetah relocations to ensure the growth, genetic and demographic integrity of the South African cheetah metapopulation. “

The major limiting factors for cheetah survival include prey availability, density of competing predators and human-caused pressures. “Simply put, if there are enough small to medium sized ungulates, the density of competing predators is not too high and anthropogenic [human-caused] pressures are not excessive, there is no reason why African cheetahs will not survive in India.” 

‘Learn as we go along’

The Cheetah Metapopulation Project, he said, has coordinated 27 reintroductions in Southern and Central Africa over the past decade. “Although some of these reintroductions have been extremely challenging, with many founder cheetahs lost, we still have wild cheetah populations at all 27 of those reintroduction sites.”  

His personal belief is that the project will encounter difficulties initially, with low survival rates for the initial founder populations sent to India. “Leopard densities are extremely high at the first proposed reintroduction site [Kuno]. All the proposed reintroduction sites are small, and most are unfenced. The cheetah will walk right out of the unfenced sites. I anticipate high losses due to conflict with leopard, snaring, starvation, and possibly retaliatory killings due to human wildlife conflict. 

“Regardless, we will adopt a metapopulation approach, with regular supplementation. The managed metapopulation in Southern Africa is growing by approximately 50 individuals per year. These surplus wild cheetahs need to be placed somewhere and India presents a massive amount of safe space for wild cheetah conservation.”

The Indian conservation authorities will “learn as we go along, as we have learnt in Southern Africa where more than 70 cheetah reintroductions have been attempted since 1965”. “Mistakes will be made initially, but lessons will be learnt. Indian authorities will develop capacity over time,” he said, citing how India’s tiger population has more than doubled in size since 2006. “The ultimate goal will be reintroductions into their tiger reserves, located within historical cheetah range. These are the best protected areas in India.Over the next 50 years, a wild Cheetah population will become established in India.”