When India’s leading wildlife scientist expounds on his pet project (‘The Cheetah’s Return’, August 5) the words carry a certain weight. For India’s conservation ethos, they could well be the last straw.
For some time now, if anything has appeared more uncertain than the poor cheetahs’ prognosis, it is the project’s purpose and goal.
With an air of reasonability, Y V Jhala writes: “Individual PAs by themselves are, however, not big enough to sustain a viable cheetah population in the long term. Therefore, conservation practitioners need to be innovative and manage cheetahs from these sites as a metapopulation — artificially moving animals between them to mimic natural dispersal for demographic and genetic viability.”
This echoes the growing consensus inside the cheetah project that “assisted dispersal” — a euphemism for shuffling sedated animals around in trucks — between pocket populations is the only way forward to make the project work.
Any population has to be of a certain size to allow enough diversity and be genetically viable in the long run.
When that is not possible, smaller groups can still function as one larger (meta) population through regular exchange of animals by natural or artificial means.
Less than two years ago, Dr Jhala authored India’s Cheetah Action Plan, which has no mention of “assisted dispersal” as a strategy. Since he started espousing the cheetah’s cause in 2010, the project’s aim has been “to establish a free-ranging breeding population of cheetahs in and around Kuno”.
In the Action Plan, Dr Jhala’s Population Viability Analysis (PVA) estimates “high probability of long-term cheetah persistence” within populations that exceed 50 individuals. But can Kuno support 50 cheetahs? Let’s look to Dr Jhala again for an answer.
Cheetal is the cheetah’s prime prey in Kuno. Dr Jhala’s own studies reported per sq km cheetal density of 5 (2006), 36 (2011), 52 (2012) and 69 (2013) in Kuno. In 2013, he explained this exceptional growth thus: “The recovery of the chital population could be attributed to the good management practices and protection measures.”
In 2010, Dr Jhala authored a cheetah feasibility report where he estimated that 347 sq km of the Kuno sanctuary could sustain 27 cheetahs, and the larger Kuno landscape — 3,000 sq km of forested habitat that surrounds the sanctuary — could potentially hold 70-100 animals.
The Supreme Court barred the project in 2013, and relented only in 2020 to allow it on an experimental basis.
By the end of 2021, Dr Jhala was ready with the Cheetah Action Plan. He now assessed Kuno’s cheetal density to be 38 per sq km. Based on this, he estimated that Kuno, now a national park of 748 sq km, could potentially sustain up to 21 cheetahs, while a larger landscape of 3,200 sq km could support 36.
A single population of 50 cheetahs did not seem feasible any more.
Even this cheetal density — estimated from the random encounter approach using camera traps — was tenuous. The Action Plan offered another estimate based on distance-sampling which threw up only 23 cheetals per sq km. This is closer to the cheetal density Dr Jhala reported after he was dropped from the project late last year: Under 20 per sq km.
Now supporting even 36 cheetahs in the larger Kuno landscape appears unrealistic.
Evidently, the cheetah project’s only option was a metapopulation scattered over central and western India. But unlike the leopards that dominate this landscape, cheetahs were never expected to travel the distances on their own. They were introduced regardless.
The solution now being casually tossed around is to borrow from the South African model that periodically translocates a few animals from one fenced-off reserve to another to maintain genetic diversity.
In all this, conveniently silenced is the thought that shuffling animals between small “island populations” is not the same as the grand promise of bringing back and establishing free-ranging cheetahs in their lost range.
A metapopulation, though, is not a novel concept imported with the cheetahs. Rapid loss of habitat across the country means even the tiger is left with only a few self-sustaining populations, typically over 80 individuals with at least 20 breeding females. Most tiger reserves are viable only in clusters, dependent on wandering young males to boost genetic health.
That is why the issue of habitat fragmentation is at the heart of most conservation battles being fought across the country. That is why our courts order construction of expensive underpasses while widening highways. And legislators demand legal protection for wildlife corridors.
Protecting a matrix of naturally interconnected forests for free movement of wildlife is the mainstay of India’s conservation ethos. Routinely shuffling cheetahs may set a dangerous precedent that will make such shortcuts acceptable for other wildlife. Already, we have started underplaying the risks of local extinction of species with the option of airlifting a few from another reserve.
Without connectivity, a forest is a genetic island. We might as well fence it up. The amendments to the Forest Conservation Act have already proposed to normalise zoos and safaris inside forests. From there, it is just another step to convert entire forests into glorified zoos.
Within legal and moral boundaries, it is an elected government’s prerogative to frame public policies. The stakeholders also have the right and the duty to weigh in. But if “assisted dispersal” becomes the new normal — and it will be, over time, if allowed for the cheetah project — the case for maintaining forest connectivity, already struggling in the face of immense pressure on land, will be severely weakened.
The question is: Why were Kuno’s cheetal density and cheetah carrying capacity grossly overestimated by qualified researchers led by India’s premier wildlife scientist who also happened to be the point person of successive governments for realising the dream of flying in cheetahs?
jay.mazoomdaar@expressindia.com
