Why was there such a rush to bring in cheetahs, asks wildlife expert

India was once home to Asiatic cheetahs. But then, in 1947, the last of these wild animals was shot by Maharaja Ramanuj Pratap Singh Deo, ruler of a tiny princely state in central India. Since then, there have been sporadic attempts at bringing cheetahs back into India, but nothing came of them till September 2022, when eight out of 20 African cheetahs were introduced into Madhya Pradesh’s Kuno National Park. Over the past 11 months, six of these cheetahs have died – some from infection, others from causes yet to be determined. In addition, 3 of the 4 cubs born in Kuno have died. And it looks like more will die. Why is this happening? Was Project Cheetah flawed and if so, can it be fixed? Are Indian forests suitable for African cheetahs? We ask Arjun Gopalaswamy, wildlife and statistical ecologist and the founder and chief scientist of Carnassials Global. He has been involved in quantitative assessments of cheetahs and other big cat populations in Asia and Africa. Edited excerpts:Q: What are your thoughts on the death of the ninth cheetah?A: As far as the project goes, these recent deaths were not expected. I think it was presumed that initially there would be one, two at the most three deaths and then the rest of the deaths will be attributed to situations in the wild, which was something that most critics of the project implementation, including myself, thought were going to be serious issues. These include predation by leopards, small space of the park leading them to disperse out.However, the large number of deaths within enclosures is a cause of concern and the recent deaths owing to skin-infections call for immediate scientific innovation — whether it has to do with collars or to do with understanding endemic parasites better. medium102670439Q: Why is this worrying?A: A: News reports indicate that 8 cheetahs were affected by the recently discovered skin infections, of which, three cheetahs have died due to further complications [flies-maggots-bacterial infections].This situation is something that nobody had explicitly thought about and immediately points to some of the larger issues on whether the right kind of cheetahs were brought and whether basic adaptation problems were a little too much for them.This calls for a much more serious introspection on what to do about it. Because these cheetahs cannot be released without radio collars since the park is unfenced. We have already seen that once the radio collars malfunction, as in the case of cheetah Nirva, it is extremely difficult to track the cheetahs.As cheetahs disperse out of the parks, they are likely to come into conflict with humans near human settlements. This situation means that radio collars have to be put on cheetahs before releasing them. If there are fenced reserves like in South Africa, you would not worry much as they are not going to leave the park.Kuno is an unfenced reserve and we know cheetahs will disperse quite widely. That is what their ecology is all about.That should have been factored in.Q: What are the issues you have with this project?A: The first main problem is with the action plan.We must understand the importance of such plans. In many countries in Asia and Africa, where I have worked in, these centralised documents become very important, irrespective of how effectively they are implemented, which can vary from place to place. They become the guiding document and serve as the basic template for how the project should proceed. So if the action plan is erroneous like the current one, then we run into this problem where all the pressure moves to the people working on the ground and they will have to come up with adhoc solutions to make the plan work.I think we are seeing that play out. From the research work my colleagues and I have done on the cheetahs, we have found that free-ranging cheetahs occur one per 100sq km in the best of habitats.Now, this is in very high prey density areas like the Masai Mara or the Serengeti. We have estimated the cheetah density to vary between 0.7 and 1.1 cheetahs per 100 sqkm where large amount of prey is available. In the same place, lions exist 17 per 100sq km which tells us how different these two cats are in terms of their spatial ecology. medium102670558Q: What does this mean? A: From studies in Serengeti and Namibia, cheetah ecologists have found that the spatial ecology of cheetahs are organised such that the territorial males space themselves roughly 20-23km apart, which is a fairly rigid system and the females and other floaters [males] organise themselves around this structure and prey availability.This basic rigidity in their spatial ecology causes them to perhaps occur at low densities relative to other cats [for example lions and tigers] even if there is adequate prey..Now, if you just apply these findings to what's written in the action plan, we find that the action plan estimates that Kuno National Park can accomodate 21 cheetahs,which translates to a density of 2.8 cheetahs per 100sq km.This is already about three to four times more than what you would expect in any unfenced reserve in Africa. Q: So, how did this number come into being? A: The whole action plan is built on this idea of harbouring 20 cheetahs within Kuno. This is called the "carrying capacity."The action plan itself suggests that 20 is an extremely important number, you can have more, but if you have less, the risk of extinction drastically increases. This overestimation has occurred because the action plan has overlooked available cheetah densities in unfenced reserves from other parts of Africa and ignored cheetah spatial ecology.On the ground, we have already seen that within two or three months after the release of the first few cheetahs into the wild, the Madhya Pradesh state forest department wrote to the Centre recommending shifting of some of the cheetahs after they saw the cheetahs exploring areas around Kuno.Two cheetahs forayed eastwards all the way up to Uttar Pradesh, about 150-200km away. They were eventually chemically immobilised and brought back to Kuno.For various reasons, many of these cheetahs have been chemically immobilised multiple times in a short span of time. Immobilising adds to the stress and increases to the mortality risk and it is something that should not be done too often.Recently, from news reports, we have heard of efforts to get the cheetahs habituated on the ground in Kuno and the plan of bringing in habituated cheetahs to India from South Africa in the next batch. Whilst these might be attempts to make the unrealistic action plan somehow work on the ground, we have now drifted away from the central goal of bringing back wild cheetahs to India. medium102669250Foreign experts’ letters reveal why cheetahs in India are dying medium102669255Q: So, how can you make Project Cheetah work?A: Anyone working in the field of conservation will tell you that it takes many years to achieve little gains. So, given adequate time, one would think that it would take at least would be a 10-15 years of effort to bring the situation on the ground ready for cheetahs. If we can secure 10,000-20,000sq km of good habitat with suitable prey, then Project Cheetah stands a chance of progress. There may be some desert options where there is some habitat left. Either way, the action plan has to be rewritten.The other question is should we bring the Namibian and South African cheetahs for this? Are African cheetahs good replacements for the Asiatic cheetahs? Geneticists argue that they are quite similar; some agree, some disagree.One thing we should notice is that the cheetahs that have been brought in here are morphologically much larger. We are talking of cheetahs that are 30-35% larger than the Asiatic cheetahs.Now, what problem this causes, we do not know. The reintroduction of a species is often thought of as an effort to restore a previously lost ecological function. And this is one of the justifications used in the action plan as well.If the smaller cheetahs that we had would hunt blackbuck and chinkaras to a large extent, this larger version will likely occupy a different niche. Theoretically speaking, if the main prey for these cheetahs is, say chital, and this also happens to be the main prey for other predators (eg, leopards), this would lead to exploitative competition, which means one of the two predators will likely be impacted.I have no idea whether it's good or bad but it is certainly going to occupy a different niche than the one we previously had. But since one of the objectives laid out in the action plan involved restoring ecosystem functions, this point becomes relevant. Watch: Will cheetah help India's conservation effort? medium nocaption92685303Q: There are reports that state forest officials do not know how to tackle the situation. Is it fair to blame them?A: A lot of the pressure will eventually reach the people working on the ground because the cheetahs are responding to ground realities in real time. Anyone who has worked on the field in India has a good idea of what level of skills on-ground forest department staff possess.They are not trained scientists. If there are scientific concerns of record keeping, collecting data, or, making close observations of the cheetahs, as brought up recently by the international experts associated with this project, it brings up a more fundamental issue of a mismatch between expectations and reality on the ground.A more basic issue is that the cheetah action plan has been written entirely by 20 authors from India, who are all unfamiliar with cheetahs. And this experimental design is being tested on cheetahs brought by internationalcheetah experts from the respective countries they work in. This is an unusual arrangement .Q: Why didn’t it happen the way it should?A: This question should be asked to the project participants. Why was there a rush to go ahead?There has been a series of critiques in science journals on this project starting with some of my colleagues and I —right after the first batch of 8 cheetahs were brought in from Namibia.There has been another scientific commentary by Bettina Wachter and her team from Namibia and there have been some scientists from South Africa who have offered critiques.There has also been a rebuttal by a few of project advisors and some others in February, which got published a day before the South Africa cheetahs arrived in India.One critical argument they appeared to depend heavily on was the positive response of the media and the enhanced political will generated after the arrival of cheetahs from Namibia.The problem of depending on such factors is that when things go wrong, for example, when cheetahs die, negative media reports of the project emerge, which can also influence political will. And this is happening now.Every time a cheetah dies, it is difficult to maintain that the project is successful.My own opinion is that the project instead should be rooted in rigorous science, because the perceptions will keep changing in the media with the politics.Q: When did this idea of reintroducing cheetahs start?A: My history is not very good. Apparently, since the 1960s, there have been attempts, but at least during my time, as an ecologist over the past two decades, the serious moves started in 2009 when Jairam Ramesh was the environment minister of the previous government. When #Cheetah are coming back to #India . A look at how the last of the lots were hunted, maimed and domesticated for hunting parties. Video made in 1939. 1/n pic.twitter.com/obUbuZoNv5

— Parveen Kaswan, IFS (@ParveenKaswan) September 16, 2022 This was triggered after one of his visits to South Africa. A plan was put in place to introduce African cheetahs to Kuno then, before being blocked in 2013 by the Supreme Court.Essentially, the plan started in 2009 and from a science point of view, if one looks at that plan, it was worse than this plan. It was a really flawed plan.In that plan, the anticipated cheetah densities was seven to eight cheetahs per 100sq km. That is about eight times of what is found in some of the best habitats in the world.If we project and ask the question, what if that plan was put into place, we may have seen many more deaths compared to now with the assumption that many more cheetahs would have been brought in initially.In that context, the 2022 implementation of Project Cheetah can be seen as an implementation of the earlier idea, albeit with a slightly improved — but still flawed — action plan.Q: Can anything be done to salvage this situation?A: It is a very tricky situation.The bigger picture is to pause and prepare the ground work to actually make it a viable option sometime in the future.You need a sound action plan based on a good scientific foundation. The first step would be to understand the requirements of free-ranging cheetah populations, and make an assessment of what India has in terms of availability and plan accordingly..The smaller picture is what do we do with the remaining 14 adults and a cub? This is the tricky part because there is really no solution.One argument could be to allow the cheetahs to roam free as planned, assess what happens and permit them to persist as long as they can in a free-ranging state without repeatedly immobilising them, which will cause stress medium102670060The other argument is to enable them to survive to the best of their ability within a fence, which will enable the project implementers to keep close track of them, especially for veterinary-related issues. But this situation will likely cause stress to the animals too.So it is a hard decision, but one that the project implementers will have to take.If the project was to still go ahead the way it is planned right now, there are some scientific innovations that are immediately necessary. For example, there needs to be a study to examine the endemic parasites in Kuno, to assess the risks involved and identify potential solutions for the future. And to test the skin infection hypothesis, a controlled study will need to be put in place, perhaps within the donor countries [South Africa and Namibia) before transporting the next batch of cheetahs.It is impractical to capture the cheetahs every time prior to every monsoon to administer antiparasitics and antibiotics.But I don't see any need to completely abandon Project Cheetah as a concept and inspiration. The project can continue, but without physically transporting cheetahs into India right away, since India is not ready to receive them yet.As a marketing idea, I think it is completely fine if it can be used as a flagship species, to secure a lot of good, suitable habitat, which will still benefit a lot of other wildlife species in India.