Home to Stay? - India Translocates Eight Cheetahs from Namibia to Kuno National Park

As we write, an unusual-looking aircraft, with the face of a big cat painted on its snout, is on its way from Namibia in Africa, to India. Its passengers are exotic, gorgeous and much-awaited. Eight cheetahs are on that flight. Benita Sen follows their news.

- Benita Sen

The cheetah disappeared from India about 70 years ago. Some years thereafter, in 1952, the cheetah was officially declared extinct by the Government of India. The close relationship between humans and an animal depicted in cave paintings dating back to the Neolithic age was thus severed. The magnificent animal is believed to have got its name from the Sanskrit word chitraka. The word means spotted or patterned.

The Asiatic cheetah that once roamed the forests of India, is now found only in small numbers in Iran. The biggest reasons behind the disappearance from India were hunting and the destruction of its habitat by human beings who cleared forests and grasslands for their own habitat, agriculture, and infrastructure like roads. Before that, it prowled through parts of India, just as tigers, lions and leopards still do.

The world's fastest land animal lost its race in India soon after the country got independence. The reintroduction of the cheetah is being done along the guidelines set down by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). A wild animal from a foreign country, a climate that is different to ours cannot be released immediately into the wilderness.

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