Deaths of African cheetahs in India shine spotlight on controversial conservation project

The world’s first intercontinental cheetah-introduction programme hit a setback last month when it emerged that three relocated animals, and three of their cubs, had died in the space of eight months. The scientists and officials behind the 500-million-rupee (US$6 million) conservation project, which was launched with great fanfare and the support of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, say they will carry on with the project. But several independent scientists question whether this is wise and the project’s long-term viability.

They expressed concern that the space reserved in India for the cheetahs is too small for the intended population, and they are not sure that enough has been done to prepare or to investigate how nearby farming communities will react to the animals. “With everything we know about cheetahs in this world, it seems a bit like hit-and-miss,” says Florian Weise, an independent wildlife biologist in Berlin, Germany who relocated cheetahs between different parks in Namibia for eight years.

A goal of Project Cheetah is to help conserve the vulnerable South African cheetah (Acinonyx jubatus jubatus). Only 6,517 cheetahs remain in the wild, according to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature. Cheetah populations have rebounded in semi-managed reserves in South Africa (these animals are not included in the ‘wild’ number), but conservationists say there is not enough safe, wild habitat there for them to expand into. The India project is an attempt to solve this problem. The country once hosted its own population of the Asiatic subspecies (A. jubatus venaticus), which is now critically endangered and present only in Iran.

Project Cheetah officially launched last September, when 8 African cheetahs were relocated from Namibia to India; 12 more were then moved from South Africa in February. Project officers released seven into Kuno National Park, an unfenced 748-square-kilometre area that was once home to cheetahs and is now inhabited by leopards (Panthera pardus).

But by late May, three of the Kuno cheetahs and three newborn cubs were dead.

The deaths of the three adult cheetahs were not unexpected given the high stress of relocation, says Adrian Tordiffe, a veterinarian at the University of Pretoria in South Africa, and a consultant for India’s Project Cheetah. Indeed, the Project Cheetah action plan notes that only 50% of the animals are expected to survive. “The fact that we had multiple deaths occurring in a short space of time is not unusual in the sense that it’s the high-risk period,” Tordiffe says. “Once things stabilize, that will plateau.”

Two died of organ failure, and a third died in a violent mating encounter.

But the deaths of the cheetah cubs are more puzzling, says Bettina Wachter, a biologist at the Cheetah Research Project, based in Berlin. Cheetah cubs in places such as the Serengeti have only a 10% survival rate owing to predation from lions (Panthera leo) and spotted hyenas (Crocuta crocuta). But in protected reserves in Namibia, where there are few predators, their survival rate is 80%, she says. She adds that, in Kuno, which has few predators, she would expect a higher survival rate.

Tordiffe was also surprised by the deaths: “I wasn’t expecting these cubs to succumb given the sort of circumstances in which they were being kept,” he says.

The Madhya Pradesh forest department, which manages Kuno and is implementing Project Cheetah, said the cubs died of malnutrition and weakness.

Too hasty

Wachter and other scientists worry that Project Cheetah was drawn up hastily, without enough preparation. Only nine months elapsed between the release of the action plan and the first animals being moved to India.

But Tordiffe says it made sense to act rapidly while there was political momentum. “When you have the political will, the financial backing and the financial support for a project like this, then you do everything that you can to try and make it happen, even in a short time frame,” he says.

In particular, there is debate over whether Kuno is big enough for the big cats.

Cheetahs need a lot of space, even compared with larger predators such as lions and tigers (Panthera tigris). Wachter says that male cheetahs maintain a 20- to 23-kilometre distance between their territories in unfenced parks in eastern and southern Africa. This separation reduces competition — and it seems to be consistent across the species, no matter the location, she says. Given these dynamics, she calculates that Kuno can house at most eight cheetahs — five males and three females.

The Project Cheetah action plan says that, with the large amount of prey at the park, it can hold 21 cheetahs.

“But there is really no evidence anywhere in the world that cheetahs squeeze together when there is more prey,” Wachter says. “In the Serengeti in Tanzania, there is a lot of prey. They could come closer to each other, but they don’t.”

Arjun Gopalaswamy, an independent wildlife biologist based in Bangalore, India, who has studied cheetahs in Kenya, agrees with Wachter’s assessment. “What’s so extravagantly special about Kuno that it can host that many cheetahs?” he asks.

But Rajesh Gopal, chair of the Project Cheetah steering committee, says Kuno can “definitely” hold 21 cheetahs. “I don’t agree with [the critics] on that,” he says. But in describing Kuno, he includes 3,200 square kilometres of potential cheetah habitat adjacent to Kuno and 3,600 square kilomtres of nearby forested area as available range.

Tordiffe points out a lack of data on cheetahs in India. “Trying to decide how many cheetahs Kuno National Park can accommodate cannot be determined by any expert,” he says. “They are basing these estimates on other systems — ones that do not exist in India at the moment.”

Meanwhile, Weise questions whether enough cheetahs would survive and breed to sustain a viable population. “If you want a proper population, you need dozens, if not hundreds, of survivors. That’s a big challenge,” he says.

Roaming cheetahs

Independent cheetah scientists also question Kuno’s proximity to farming communities. Translocated cheetahs in southern Africa explore thousands of square kilometres in the first 6 to 12 months after release, Weise says. “Imagine I tranquilize you, and I release you in Antarctica, and you wake up in a place that you’re not familiar with,” he says. “Any intelligent mammal will start looking around. We had records of individual animals moving between 40 and 70 kilometres in a night.”

Weise and others expect that cheetahs will leave Kuno and enter the surrounding countryside. Two Kuno cheetahs have already roamed outside the park. “Almost by design, they are going to live in the farmlands,” Gopalaswamy says. “Now, there’s nothing wrong with that, but was that factored in? If they’re going to just disperse out and live with people, it’s a completely different question.”

The action plan originally suggested that the animals would be restricted to the park, but Gopal says the project is preparing for roaming animals. He says that, in the next few weeks, government scientists will use remote sensing to study the 6,800 square kilometres of the park and its surrounds to find potential sites of cheetah–human conflict. “The forest department needs to create a community stewardship programme so villagers are rewarded financially for protecting the cheetah,” Gopal says. “This is not new for India,” he adds. “We have been handling tigers for the last 50 years.”

Once the landscape-level threat analysis is complete, seven more cheetahs could be released by the end of this month, Gopal says.

Success

In the long run, the success of Kuno’s cheetahs will depend on how tolerant people in the area are, Wachter says. “When the tiger and leopards are already there, whether they say, ‘OK, it doesn’t matter if we have the cheetah.’ Or whether they say, ‘This is now one carnivore too much, and we don’t want it.’”

“I’m not entirely against moving them to India,” Weise says. “But if they have surplus animals and don’t know where else to put them, I’m not sure India is the best place.”

Rather than introducing African cheetahs, India could focus instead on helping Iran to conserve its animals, Weise says.

Source: Ecology - nature.com