By Shakir Husain
NEW DELHI, Sept 17 (NNN-Bernama) — Cheetahs will be roaming India’s forests again, decades after the species went extinct in the country.
India on Saturday received eight cheetahs, five female and three male, from Namibia as part of a project to reintroduce these big cats in its wildlife sanctuaries.
The first batch is being released into the Kuno National Park, a 750 square kilometre nature reserve in the central state of Madhya Pradesh.
Radio collars will be put on the cheetahs for the remote monitoring of their movements.
The cheetah was declared extinct from India in 1952.
India plans to bring more cheetahs from South Africa, Namibia and other African countries over a period of five years.
“The introduction of the cheetah is not only a species recovery program but an effort to restore ecosystems with a lost element that has played a significant role in their evolutionary history,” the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change said last month.
The government will use the cheetah “as an umbrella species for conserving the biodiversity of grasslands, savanna and open forest systems.”
— NNN-BERNAMA
