Cheetah reintroduction is Indian wildlife’s demonetization moment
A recent letter by scientists in favour of cheetah reintroduction emphasizes how the exercise was always an experiment, contrary to what the government has been telling us.
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Editor's note: How many cheetahs can a forest hold? That is the question being asked as 12 more of the felines were released into the Kuno National Park. The eight introduced earlier will soon be ending their quarantine to roam free in the western Madhya Pradesh forest. Worryingly though, there’s still not enough clarity on whether the reintroduction of the cheetahs was a good idea in the first place. Wildlife scientists and observers have put forward opposing views on a crucial metric: The number of cheetahs that can naturally thrive in a given patch of forest. The government’s Cheetah Action Plan, which was released in January 2022, claims that 21 cheetahs can live in Kuno’s roughly 750 sq. km territory; so an average of three cheetahs per 100 sq. km. The explanation for this number occupies just two paragraphs of the 310-page plan. It considers all species weighing less than 60 kg to be the cheetah’s potential prey base. A sampling was carried out in Kuno to determine how many such animals existed. Among primates, about 10% of the langurs made the …
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