To be spotted again: India wants to bring back the cheetah

Andrew Buncombe, The Independent 8 Jul 09;

They appear in portraits and carvings and the Mughal Emperor Ashoka was said to have kept more than 1,000 for hunting. But the cheetah – prized for its speed and its ability to be trained – has not been seen in India for at least 60 years.

Now the government wants to bring them back. In an ambitious plan to reintroduce an animal whose numbers were reduced to zero by hunting, India's Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh told parliament that plans were under way to identify whether the big cat's return would be possible. "The cheetah is the only animal to have been declared extinct in India in the last 1,000 years," he said this week. "We have to get them from abroad to repopulate the species here."

The plan will involve importing cheetahs from Namibia and trying to establish breeding populations in specially constructed enclosures. If this were successful the animals would be then set free in the wild – putting them alongside the leopard, the tiger and the Asiatic lion, which constitute India's other large cats.

The government's moves follow a proposal made by an NGO, the Wildlife Trust of India (WTI), that has drawn up a detailed plan to reintroduce the sleek, high-speed cat. It has identified several locations which it believes could become suitable habitats. An international conference involving experts from Africa and Europe will be held in September to move the project forward.

"The government has agreed in principle to the reintroduction of the cheetah," said MK Ranjitsinh, the WTI's chairman. He said the problems that the cheetah would confront would be the same as those faced by India's other wild cats – the proximity of humans and the decline in prey species. "We would have to build that up – the deer and the antelope," he added.

The cheetahs that once roamed from Arabia to Iran, Afghanistan and India, are Asiatic cheetahs. The name derives from the Sanskrit word chitraka, meaning "speckled". Yet while it is estimated that at the turn of the 20th century there may have been several thousand in India where they were known as hunting leopards, and were kept to hunt gazelle, the subspecies is today critically endangered with perhaps no more than 60 animals remaining in the wild. This last, tiny population is confined to Iran's Kavir desert with perhaps a few still remaining in south-west Pakistan.

Experts say that unlike the African and Indian elephant, there is little genetic difference between the African and Asiatic cheetahs. "These animals are very close. I think they could probably breed together, the only problem is that there aren't really any Asiatic cheetahs left – just some in Iran," said Stephen O'Brien, head of the US government's Laboratory of Genomic Diversity and author of Tears of the Cheetah: And Other Tales from the Genetic Frontier. "This reintroduction is something they have been talking about for decades. I think it's probably worth a try."

There is little doubt that the battle to reintroduce an animal such as the cheetah would be a tremendous challenge. Already India is fighting what appears to be a losing battle to retain its tiger population. Estimated to number perhaps 100,000 in 1900, the total today may be as few as 1,300. Almost every week there are reports of tigers being killed in India's national parks and reserves, either by poachers or villagers whose homes increasingly encroach on the animal's habitat.

India's population of leopards, meanwhile, may total 14,000, while the Asiatic lion, which once spread as far as the Mediterranean, is confined to the Gir forest in the western state of Gujarat where it numbers around 350. There are plans to reintroduce them to another national park in the state of Madhya Pradesh.

In addition to the problems of habitat and human population confronted by India's other big cat population, the cheetah would also face the issue of lack of genetic diversity. Studies have shown that the gene pool of the world's African cheetah population is unhealthily small, something that has led to low birth rate and high abnormalities. If there were just a small breeding population in India, the problem may be exacerbated.

This would not be the first time India has sought to reintroduce the cheetah. During the first half of the decade, scientists at the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology in Hyderabad worked on a plan to collect tissue samples from an Asiatic cheetah in an Iranian zoo and clone the animal. "In the end the Iranians did not give us permission," said the director, Lalji Singh.

It is commonly claimed that the last known three Asiatic cheetahs in India were shot dead in 1947 by the Maharaja of Surguja, the ruler of a princely state in what is now eastern Madhya Pradesh. He also bears the dark honour of holding the record for shooting the most tigers – a total of 1,360. Yet his great-grandson and the current maharajah, Tribhuvaneshwar Saran Singh Deo, questioned whether his ancestor was responsible for the cheetah's demise. While confirming the tally of tigers ("They were very different times," he said) he added that the family had no information that he had ever shot cheetahs.

Ironically, Madhya Pradesh is one of the areas that experts have identified as a location for the possible return of the cheetah.

The fastest thing on four legs

* The cheetah is the fastest land animal, capable of reaching speeds of between 112 and 120kph.

* When closing on its prey it is capable of accelerating from 0 to 110kph in three seconds, faster than most sports cars.

* The body length of an adult cheetah is between 115 and 135cm, of which the tail accounts for up to 84cm.

* An adult cheetah weighs between 40 and 65kg.

India plans return of the cheetah
BBC News 20 Sep 09;

India plans to bring back the cheetah, nearly half a century after it became extinct in the country. The BBC's Soutik Biswas considers whether it is a good idea.

Will the world's fastest land animal make a comeback in India, nearly half a century after it became extinct in the country?

A serious initiative is afoot to bring the cheetah back to India and make it, as many wildlife experts say, the "flagship species" of the country's grasslands, which do not have a single prominent animal now.

A similar effort in 1970's - India was then talking to Iran, which had around 300 cheetahs at that time - flopped after the Shah of Iran was deposed and the negotiations never progressed.

'Strong case'

A recent meeting of wildlife officials, cheetah experts and conservationists from all over the world discussed the "reintroduction" of the spotted cat and agreed that the case for its return was strong.

Seven sites - national parks, sanctuaries and other open areas - in the four states of Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat and Chhattisgarh have been shortlisted as potential homes for the cheetah.

These sites will now be surveyed extensively to find out the state of the habitat, the number of prey and prospects of man-animal conflict to finally determine whether they can accommodate the cheetah.

If one or more sites are found to have favourable habitat and prey for the cheetah, India will then possibly have to import the cat from Africa, because the numbers of the Asiatic cheetah which are available only in Iran have dwindled to under 100.

The overwhelming number of 10,000 cheetahs left in the world are in Africa.

Genetic scientists like the US-based Stephen O' Brien say that the genetic similarities between the Iranian and African cheetah is "very close", so there should be no problems bringing the latter to India.

Most of the experts agreed that wild cheetahs or the progeny of wild cheetahs in captivity should be brought to India, quarantined for a while, and released in the selected habitats.

Dr Laurie Marker, founder of the Cheetah Conservation Fund, says reintroducing the cheetah "will not be easy - but it is doable".

"We have the techniques and knowledge to do it. The cheetah living in India again might be a good thing. Its extinction is fairly recent and it is a top predator which could help by becoming an icon, help bring back the health of grassland ecosystems," she says.

'Haste'

But many leading conservationists have doubts about the current initiative.

They fear that in its haste of bringing back the cheetah, India will end up housing them in semi-captive conditions in huge, secured open air zoos, but not free in the wild.

They say without restoring habitat and prey base and the chances of a man-animal conflict, viable cheetah populations cannot be established.

"The present initiative of bringing in a few cheetahs from Africa and letting them loose in an enclosure where they will be fed artificially given the size of the enclosure and the cheetah's natural prey requirements is putting the cart before the horse," says Dr K Ulhas Karanth, one of India's top conservation experts.

"Where are the several thousand square kilometres of habitat free of small livestock, children, and other potential prey? If cheetahs are to be introduced, relocation of human settlements on a sufficient scale to create the vast habitats will be needed. How can we deal with conflict between cheetahs and wild animals?"

Studies show that over 200 cheetahs were killed in India during the colonial period mainly due to conflicts with sheep and goat herders, and not because they were gunned down by trophy hunters.

Also conservationists point to India's chequered record of reintroducing animals.

Lions were reintroduced in Chandraprabha santuary in the 1950s, but poached out of existence. Tigers were reintroduced in Dungarpur in the 1920s, but they were all shot dead by the end of 1950s.

Even captive breeding exercises have proved to be futile sometimes - in the early 1990s, American zoos captive-bred lion tailed monkeys for release in India's Western Ghats even as monkeys were getting poached and their forest habitats logged.

Then there is the question of prey - a cheetah, says environmental historian Mahesh Rangarajan, needs at least 50 to 80 antelope sized prey a year, and a mother needs more.

"Is such a prey base at all available?," asks Mr Rangarajan.

'Conserving ecosystem'

In India, cheetahs would essentially prey on blackbuck and gazelle -the largest herd of blackbuck in India is some 2,000 animals and already has the wolf as a predator.

"Cheetah could live off smaller prey, but then you need a lot more of them," says Mr Rangarajan.

But the conservationists who are leading the initiative say these fears are unfounded, and the decision to bring back the cat to India will only be taken after the shortlisted sites are fully examined for habitat, prey and potential for man-animal conflict.

MK Ranjitsinh, chairman of the Wildlife Trust of India, which is participating in the new initiative, says the plan is to import African cheetahs and release them in the wild in designated open areas, which have been examined and checked thoroughly.

"The plan is to bring cheetahs from the wild in Africa and release them in the wild in India. The cat will help in conserving the ecosystem," he says.

Even the federal environment minister Jairam Ramesh is upbeat about the initiative.

"Personally, I feel we would be reclaiming a part of our wonderful and varied ecological history if the cheetah was to be reintroduced in the wild," he says.

Clearly it is early days and it may be quite some time before the cheetah stalks India's grasslands once again.

But reintroducing the cat in India has a lot of symbolic value.

The first cheetah in the world to be bred in captivity was in India during the rule of Mughal emperor Jahangir. His father, Akbar, recorded that there were 10,000 cheetahs during his time.

Much later, research showed that were at least 230 cheetahs in India between 1799 and 1968 - and the cat was reportedly sighted for the last time in the country in 1967-68.

Clearly, returning the cheetah to India - the only large mammal to become extinct since independence in 1947 - is going to be the easy part.

Making sure it thrives and doesn't get poached and get into conflict with humans is going to be much, much harder.