India plans return of the cheetah

by Soutik Biswas - BBC

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/8262862.stm

India plans to bring back the cheetah, nearly half a century after it became extinct in the country. The BBC's Soutik Biswas considers whether it is a good idea.

Will the world's fastest land animal make a comeback in India, nearly half a century after it became extinct in the country?

A serious initiative is afoot to bring the cheetah back to India and make it, as many wildlife experts say, the "flagship species" of the country's grasslands, which do not have a single prominent animal now.

A similar effort in 1972 - India was then talking to Iran, which had around 300 cheetahs at that time - flopped after the Shah of Iran was deposed and the negotiations never progressed.

'Strong case'

A recent meeting of wildlife officials, cheetah experts and conservationists from all over the world discussed the "reintroduction" of the spotted cat and agreed that the case for its return was strong.

Seven sites - national parks, sanctuaries and other open areas - in the four states of Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat and Chhattisgarh have been shortlisted as potential homes for the cheetah.

These sites will now be surveyed extensively to find out the state of the habitat, the number of prey and prospects of man-animal conflict to finally determine whether they can accommodate the cheetah.
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http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/8262862.stm

Posted: Monday, September 21, 2009 | Permalink

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1. Comment #417520 by Janus on September 21, 2009 at 1:16 am

Just grow them in a test tube (in a decade or two).

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2. Comment #417524 by root2squared on September 21, 2009 at 1:45 am

Then there is the question of prey - a cheetah, says wildlife expert Mahesh Rangarajan, needs at least 50 to 80 antelope sized prey a year, and a mother needs more.

India needs more cheetahs and less people.

Hmm.

Those offended - please mail your complaints to

Humor Impaired,
Black Hole,
Milky Way.

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3. Comment #417556 by neander on September 21, 2009 at 6:18 am

On a similar line.... didn't they re-introduce wolves into Scotland?
Have any scots been eaten to date? Or, like the ninth legion, will the scots just eat them?

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4. Comment #417582 by seabala on September 21, 2009 at 8:58 am

Yeah, I'm from India and there's vast swathes of grasslands and rainforests for wildlife to flourish. But most of these are also sparsely inhabited. There was even a BBC doco about how Bengal tiger population steadily declined after rampant hunting. The media kept saying the tigers entered villages at night and killed cattle. For a moment we seem to forget that its not the tiger that came into our territory. Its us, who settled in tiger territory coz our cities were crowded.

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5. Comment #417585 by elise97 on September 21, 2009 at 9:02 am

"Yeah, I'm from India and there's vast swathes of grasslands and rainforests for wildlife to flourish. But most of these are also sparsely inhabited."

hmm. i think they are doing something about that.

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6. Comment #417601 by seabala on September 21, 2009 at 10:20 am

"Yeah, I'm from India and there's vast swathes of grasslands and rainforests for wildlife to flourish. But most of these are also sparsely inhabited."

I actually meant to say that the grasslands are not entirely uninhabited and they are dotted with human population. Looks like somehow I managed to mean exactly the opposite. The tricks and traps of the English language - never fails to fascinate me.

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7. Comment #417618 by InfuriatedSciTeacher on September 21, 2009 at 12:08 pm

Seabala> No worries, I've never even been introduced to the tricks and traps of Hindi (or Punjabi, or whichever other languages you speak), so I (we) won't criticise that one...

I find the idea of reintroductions both exciting and somewhat troubling. The Yellowstone wolves provide a solid example: it's great that we as humans can reintroduce a species to part of its native range, but not so helpful to the species if we don't educate the people who now live in that part of its native range on why they shouldn't shoot the animal on sight.

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8. Comment #417623 by elise97 on September 21, 2009 at 12:30 pm

"I actually meant to say that the grasslands are not entirely uninhabited and they are dotted with human population. "

it might seem sparse, but you can bet it is a quickly expanding population that is exploiting a dry a relatively unproductive habitat to its limits. sparse does not necessarily mean in balance - big cats have a VERY sparse population by necessity. although i applaud any big cat conservation efforts, they are for nothing in the long term if the human population issue is not addressed. big cats kill livestock - farmer shoots big cat. growing population gets short of money - trap big cats for profit. they might as well flush the conservation effort down the drain right now without a human population stabilization/reduction policy.

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9. Comment #417625 by rod-the-farmer on September 21, 2009 at 12:51 pm

Well, they DO have a lot of spare cows walking around, who seemed to have evolved away from any ability to outrun predators. A match made in.....Hindu... ?

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10. Comment #417633 by PERSON on September 21, 2009 at 1:35 pm

1. Comment #417520 by Janus on September 21, 2009 at 1:16 am
This requires samples from a sufficiently large population. How much would it cost to extract and store the DNA from, say, 5000 (or perhaps the whole population?)
There is the problem of unlimited cost: it is unknown when (or even if) the technology will be available to reconstitute cheetahs from these samples, so it's impossible to say how long the material would need to be stored for. It cannot be guaranteed what the minimum cost will be to do this, either, causing further delays or perhaps making the project unviable even if theoretically possible.
It may not be very easy to store DNA without significant corruption for this length of time, even in low temperatures. It may well require large samples, inflating the cost of storage further.
These unknowns mean that the a limit cannot easily be placed on the potential cost.
It is likely to use far less resources to just try and sustain the population. It's not a case of having a rack of five test tubes in a freezer with a label saying "cheetahs".
Further, there are other species that it would be more efficient and effective to sample from, with populations so critically small they are near guaranteed to go extinct and could be sampled completely.

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11. Comment #417644 by Border Collie on September 21, 2009 at 2:02 pm

I've always wanted to be a poacher hunter. I think I'll apply.

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12. Comment #417982 by MatthaiNazrani on September 22, 2009 at 1:00 pm

I'm in India as well, but I'll have to take seabala's word about there being enough grasslands in the wildlife preserves (national parks). The ones in my state are tropical rainforests, including a tiger preserve. But humans already live there too.

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13. Comment #417984 by MatthaiNazrani on September 22, 2009 at 1:03 pm

root2squared,

Cheetahs are probably less effective than condoms, but certainly more spectacular.

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