Kuno National Park welcomes 12 South African cheetahs
NEW DELHI,FEB 18 : Months after eight big cats were ferried from Namibia, India again welcomed 12 more cheetahs from South Africa on Saturday. The second batch of cheetahs landed at the air force station in Gwalior and were taken to Kuno National Park.
An IAF C-17 aircraft carrying the second batch of 12 Cheetahs landed at Air Force Station in Gwalior earlier today, after a 10-hour flight from Johannesburg, South Africa.
These Cheetahs were later airlifted in IAF helicopters and the felines reached the Kuno National Park.
The cheetahs will be released into their quarantine enclosures by Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan and Environment Minister Bhupender Yadav.
Twelve cheetahs — five of them female –were flown in from South Africa, three years after India first mooted the idea. India and South Africa signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) in January 2022. For the first time in history, South Africa will be translocating 12 cheetahs to India as part of an initiative to expand the cheetah meta-population and to reintroduce the mammals in the country, the country’s forest department said on Twitter.
South Africa’s forest department shared a long Twitter thread showing how these cheetahs were darted and loaded into relocation crates before being re-located to Kuno.
The 12 cheetahs were loaded onto the Galaxy Globemaster C17 transport of the Indian Air Force. They will be hydrated with drips and their collar fittings will also be checked.
The cheetahs will embark on the journey to Kuno from the O R Tambo International Airport in Gauteng on Friday evening, Bhupender Yadav told PTI. Ten quarantine bomas have been created at KNP for the 12 spotted felines.
A consultative workshop involving international cheetah experts, scientists, veterinarians, and forest officials will be held on February 20 at Kuno.
Under the ambitious Cheetah reintroduction programme, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had released the first batch of eight spotted felines including five females — from Namibia into a quarantine enclosure at Kuno on his 72nd birthday on September 17 last year.
The African Cheetah Introduction Project in India’ was conceived in 2009 but it failed to take off for over a decade. The plan to introduce the cheetah by November 2021 in Kuno suffered a setback due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
-PTI
