The death of the seventh cheetah translocated from Africa to India’s Kuno National Park, Shaurya, has cast an ominous shadow on the Narendra Modi government’s ambitious Project Cheetah.

Shaurya, a male Namibian cheetah whose name means courage, died on Tuesday afternoon. He is the tenth to pass away on Indian soil—where the big cat is extinct. This includes three cheetah cubs that were born in Kuno and died in May last year. Twenty cheetahs were brought to India from Namibia (8) and South Africa (12) in two batches—in 2022 and 2023, respectively. Project Cheetah is the first intercontinental translocation project for the wild cat.

A statement by forest officials said that they found Shaurya staggering around 11 am on Tuesday morning and rushed to tranquillize the wild cat. However, “despite reviving the cheetah through medical intervention, it developed some post-revival complications that eventually resulted in its demise. The animal failed to respond to CPR efforts.”

It was not clear what Shaurya’s examination showed and whether tranquilizing him may have worsened the symptoms. The officials said they could only determine more after a post-mortem analysis.

Chief conservator Uttam Sharma told The Print that Shaurya neither showed any symptoms of distress nor had any injury marks on his body. The publication said that the cheetah’s death was suspected to be from a disease as there were no marks on his body and the death did not result from territorial fight or mating. “Until last evening, Shaurya was fit and there was no cause for alarm,” a forest official said.

The news is especially heartbreaking as forest officials welcomed the birth of three cheetah cubs just at the beginning of the year.

Not so much a survival of the fittest: In its Cheetah Action Plan 2022, one of the benchmarks listed for the project’s short-term success was the survival of at least “50% of the introduced cheetahs for the first year.” But several of the cheetah deaths seem related to poor management and not owing to the causes listed in the action plan.

South African and Namibian experts, who are members of the national cheetah project steering committee, under which the big cats were sent to India also wrote to the Supreme Court that they were kept in the dark and raised concerns regarding the way the project was being managed.

They believe that some of the cheetah deaths “could have been prevented by better monitoring of the animals and more appropriate” and timely “veterinary care”.

In an Indian Express column, Y.V, Jhala, the project’s lead scientist and former dean of the Wildlife Institute of India, also reiterated that some of the cheetah deaths were “management related” and “expensive learning experiences that the project could have done without”.

Several of the cheetahs died due to septicemia caused by skin lesions, which got infected by maggots. The lesions are believed to be due to radio collars put on them for tracking, which in India’s humid monsoon weather seem to have aggravated the cheetahs’ condition. Also read: Lingering questions before we move on from the cheetah story.

“Unfortunately, the inexperience of the field staff did not allow detection of the infection in time which could have led to an easy cure,” Jhala wrote. It is noteworthy that Jhala did not find a spot in the government’s new task force in 2022. In March last year, the government also curtailed his two-year extension as the dean of the Wildlife Institute of India, forcing him to resign.

“I really do not know why they asked me to leave. Since the cheetahs arrived on September 17, I was not allowed to meet the PM. Then, I was asked to resign. I did not want to resign. I selected the animals in Namibia, I brought all the animals from there. Whom have I rubbed wrong? I am not sure. The one-year extension was important for me. My dreams came true during the past one year. Now others will take over. I have worked on cheetahs and animals all over the country. Wildlife is important to me,” the wildlife expert was quoted as saying by the Hindustan Times.

Right from its announcement, The Morning Context has remained wary of the project. Read: Should India become a home for the African cheetah? We wrote about how the cheetah reintroduction is Indian wildlife’s demonetization moment and The sentencing of Shri Pavan, aka Oban. In an earlier edition of the news explainer, we had also written about the delicate nature of such translocation projects and how such first-of-its-kind experiments could come at the cost of the lives of the endangered animals.