WINDHOEK —
Eight Namibian cheetahs were on Friday airlifted to
India, part of an ambitious
project to reintroduce the big cats after they were driven to extinction there
decades ago, officials and vets said.
اضافة اعلان
The wild cheetahs were moved by road from a game
park north of the Namibian capital Windhoek to board a chartered Boeing 747
dubbed “Cat plane” for an 11-hour flight.
They will be personally welcomed by Prime Minister
Narendra Modi on Saturday, his 72nd birthday.
He will swing open the gates of Kuno National Park,
a new sanctuary created for the cats, 320km south of Delhi.
The 750sq.km. protected park was selected as a home
because of its abundant prey and grasslands.
The project is the world’s first inter-continental
translocation of cheetahs, the world’s fastest land animal, according to the
Indian high commissioner to Namibia, Prashant Agrawal.
“This is historic, global first. Game-changing,” he
told AFP. “We are all the more excited because it is happening in the 75th year
of Indian independence”.
Critics have warned that the Namibian cheetahs may
struggle to adapt to the Indian habitat and may clash with the significant
number of leopards already present.
But organizers are unfazed.
“Cheetahs are very
adaptable and (I’m) assuming that they will adapt well into this environment.
So I don’t have a lot of worries,” said Dr Laurie Marker, founder of the
Namibia-based charity Cheetah Conservation Fund (CCF), which has been central
to the project logistics.
The project has been in the making for more than a
decade. Initial discussion started in the 1990s, she told AFP.
India was once home to the Asiatic cheetah but it
was declared extinct there by 1952. The critically endangered subspecies, which
once roamed across the Middle East, Central Asia, and India, are now only
found, in very small numbers, in Iran.
New Delhi has since 2020 been working to reintroduce
the animals after the
Supreme Court announced that African cheetahs, a different
subspecies, could be settled in a “carefully chosen location” on an
experimental basis.
The five females and three males, aged between two
and five and a half, will each be fitted with a satellite collar.
They are a donation from the government of Namibia,
one of a tiny handful of countries in Africa where the magnificent creature
survives in the wild.
Negotiations are ongoing for similar translocation
from South Africa, a government official told AFP on Friday, with vets
suggesting 12 cats could be moved.
Cheetahs became extinct in India primarily because
of habitat loss and hunting for their distinctive spotted coats.
An Indian prince, the Maharaja Ramanuj Pratap Singh
Deo, is widely believed to have killed the last three recorded cheetahs in India
in the late 1940s.
One of the oldest of the big cat species, with
ancestors dating back about 8.5 million years, cheetahs once roamed widely
throughout Asia and Africa in great numbers, said CCF.
But today only around 7,000 remain, primarily in the
African savannas.
The cheetah is listed globally as “Vulnerable” on
the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (
IUCN) Red List of
Threatened Species.
In North Africa and Asia it is “Critically
Endangered”.
Their survival is threatened primarily by dwindling
natural habitat and loss of prey due to human hunting, the development of land
for other purposes, and climate change.
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