Picture: John Yeld
JOHANNESBURG - With the death of a second cheetah in India this week, researchers are warning that there are shortcomings in a plan to reintroduce the once extinct predator to the subcontinent.
The South African male cheetah named Uday died on Sunday after he was found unwell in his enclosure in central India’s Kuno National Park.
A preliminary autopsy, according to media reports in India, suggest that the six-year-old male died of cardiopulmonary failure.
He had not been released into the park as he was still in quarantine.
In March, a Namibian cheetah named Sasha died of a kidney ailment, also while in quarantine.
The two cats were part of a group of 12 South African and eight Namibian cheetahs that have been sent to India as part of a programme to reintroduce the felines that became extinct in the country about 70 years ago.
The plan is to bring about 100 cheetahs over the next decade into several India reserves. These African cats will repopulate areas that were once the roaming grounds of the Asiatic cheetah.
But just before the announcement of Uday’s death, a group of scientists from the Cheetah Research Project of Leibniz-IZW in Namibia wrote a letter that appeared in the scientific journal Conservation Science and Practice, raising their concerns about the reintroduction programme.
From their research, they believe that the introduced cheetahs will not have the space to establish the social networks they are accustomed to in Africa. They are also concerned that the cheetah will wander outside of the unfenced reserve and come into contact with humans and possibly prey on livestock.
The African cats have already wandered into human settlements. Four have so far been released into the park.
“There is one male that they have had to bring back to the park for a third time,” Dr Bettina Wachter, the head of the Cheetah Research Project, told the Saturday Star.
Wachter and her team believe, through a long term study they conducted on cheetahs in Namibia, that the carrying capacity for these cats is between 0.2 and 1 adult per 100 km². This is not just typical for Namibia, but also for the Serengeti in East Africa.
Scientists have found that male cheetahs follow two different behavioural patterns. There are males that hold territory and those who don't, who are referred to as floaters. It is the floaters who move and live outside of existing territories, just as the females do. Now and again floaters will move into a territory to assess the strength of the dominant male, and to see if he is still around.
“The territories do not border each other, their centres are always about 20 to 23 kilometres apart,” says Dr Jörg Melzheimer, also of the Cheetah Research Project. “The space between the territories is not defended by any male, it is the living and transit space for floaters and females.”
Scientists, vets and conservationists involved in the Indian cheetah reintroduction programme did defend their approach in a recent article that appeared in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution.
They pointed out that they had fully assessed the Kuno National Park and other parks for their suitability to hold cheetah populations.
In total, the plan was to introduce cheetahs into 10 million hectares of protected reserve land that was the historic range of the Asiatic cheetah. The density of cheetah populations would be determined by the availability of prey, they argued.
A success for the reintroduction programmes is that one of the females recently gave birth to four cubs.
The researchers at the Cheetah Research Project, however, in their letter called on all future reintroductions of cheetah in India to take into account what they refer to as the species’ spatial organisation.
“You have to be more responsible. You need to think carefully, take everything we know and make small steps, not big changes, because it is an endangered species, after all,” says Wachter.