Roaring Comeback: India to Reintroduce the Cheetah

India's reintroduction of the cheetah is no yawning matter. (Photo: Staff Photographer / Reuters)

Hunted to extinction on the continent in 1947, the cheetah will be reintroduced to India over the next year, reports The Guardian.

"It is important to bring the cheetah back as it will help restore the grasslands of India," Jairam Ramesh, Indian minister for environment and forests, told the Guardian.

"The way the tiger restores forest ecosystems, the snow leopard restores mountain ecosystems, and the Gangetic dolphin restores waters in the rivers, in the same way the cheetah will restore our grasslands,” said Ramesh.

Donated from Iran, Namibia, and South Africa, 18 of the spotted big cats will be dispersed across three sites.

Officials hope the reserves will combine to service a population of more than 100 cheetahs.

Given the recent past of India’s wildlife, the news couldn’t come at a better time, reports the Guardian:

The country's world famous population of tigers has shrunk from more than 3,600 in 2002 to around 1,400 now. Successive government initiatives have foundered on corruption; conflicts between often extremely poor local communities and the animals; the power of organised criminal smuggling networks which supply tiger parts to east Asia, and simple administrative inertia. The population of snow leopards now numbers between 100 and 200, possibly less than a third of the total a decade ago. The Gangetic dolphin remains endangered, although the number of Asiatic lions has recently increased.

Still, not all are warm to cheetah reintroduction.

"Nature has given us something that we did not know how to keep. Why do we think we can recreate it? Why do we think we will be able to keep it better now?” Ali Sher, a cheetah expert at the Indian Institute of Immunology, told the Guardian.

Meanwhile, cheetah news in Cameroon is dire.

According to a three-year study conducted by researchers in the Netherlands, the Cameroonian cheetah is “functionally extirpated,” reports National Geographic.

Researchers blame “habitat loss, poaching, a decline in prey, and retaliatory killing by game rangers” for the near extinction, writes Mongabay.

Scientists believe that approximately 7,500 cheetahs exist in the wild.

Quick Study: Biodiversity | Conservation

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