Experts from South Africa and Namibia have written to the Supreme Court (SC) over being uninformed about the cheetah project’s management in India.
The experts, all members of the national cheetah project steering committee, under which 20 cheetahs have been translocated to India beginning last September, have raised “serious concerns” over the project’s management.
The members said that some of the cheetah deaths “could have been prevented by better monitoring of the animals and more appropriate” and timely “veterinary care”, had they been contacted about the issues rather than being “ignored”.
In September last year, eight cheetahs from Namibia were released into the Kuno National Park in Madhya Pradesh and another 12 cheetahs landed from South Africa this February.
Since the first two cheetahs were released in the wild on March 11, five adults and three cubs have died in the national park.
On July 15, days after the death of two male South African cheetahs caused by radio collar injuries, South African veterinary wildlife specialist Adrian Tordiffe signed a letter on behalf of his colleagues: cheetah specialist Vincent van der Merwe; and wildlife veterinarians Andy Fraser and Mike Toft, according to a report in The Indian Express.
Around the same time, another letter was written by the executive director of Namibia’s cheetah conservation fund, flagging similar issues.
The letter by the South African experts flagged how the project’s management has “little or no scientific training”, how the foreign experts’ “opinions” are being “ignored;” why they “had to beg for information” and how they “have become mere window dressing” for the project, according to The Indian Express report.
The experts said that the Kuno field team wrongly assumed that the male cheetah, spotted at around 11 am on July 11 with wounds on the back of his neck, was injured by a female cheetah.
The letter stated: “The staff at Kuno left the injured male, deciding rather to locate the female to check if she was also injured. During that time the condition of the male deteriorated, and he died at around 2 pm without having received any treatment.”
The experts claimed that they heard from the Kuno staff the next morning when a summary and some photos of the postmortem were shared.
The letter further said: “No comment was made about the inflammation of the skin over the neck or the very large number of maggots that were clearly visible in the photo.”
The experts have asked the SC to enable sharing of “clinical findings… real-time so that a collective decision can be made on how to treat each animal.”