Return of the Indian Cheetah

“Are we somehow wanting to live in the past by bringing back a species which has not been there for at least seven decades?  Because it is important for Indian ecology and conservation to be forward-looking to meet the challenges of the future.”

-        Ravi Chellam, Metastring Foundation

In an age in which we are losing so much of our biodiversity, the concept of rewilding has always had a special appeal for me.  It’s not just enough to hold on to a few tattered scraps of the natural world, keeping them carefully preserved in a few highly managed parks like family heirlooms.  We should be trying to weave those scraps back together, restoring the ecological integrity of the planet as much as we can.  Some of the boldest rewilding proposals out there (apart from, say, cloning mammoths) are those concerned with the restoration of large carnivores.

Not surprisingly, those are also the most controversial.

The Indian subcontinent already has the world’s most diverse assemblage of the great cats.  There are tigers and leopards and clouded leopards, snow leopards in the Himalayas and a relict population of Asian lions.  The picture isn’t complete, however.  There is one absent member of the cast.

The cheetah is returning to India but at what cost?

The last confirmed records of wild cheetahs in Asia date back to 1948 (though sightings have persisted), a lifetime ago for humans (and several lifetimes for cheetahs), a millisecond on the evolutionary timescale.  Today, only a tiny population of cheetahs remains in Iran.  Since the 1970s, even before the Iranian Revolution, there were talks of using Iranian cheetahs to repopulate India’s grasslands.  The miniscule numbers of Asian cheetahs, combined with Iran’s frequent pariah status among nations of the world, has stifled these talks in recent years.

Now, the Indian government seems poised to make its move – not with Iranian cheetahs, but with Africans.  A genetically diverse (well, as genetically diverse as cheetahs get) sampling of African cats will be released in Kuno National Park, historically home to cheetahs, lions, leopards, and tigers.  The cheetahs selected for this project will be ones accustomed to living alongside other big carnivores.  The plan has the potential to restore an integral component to the plains of India, where cheetahs historically chased down spotted deer, blackbuck, Indian gazelle, and other ungulates.

A male Asiatic cheetah in Iran (Wikimedia Commons/Erfan Kouchari)

Some conservationists are pessimistic about the project.  They point out that, though they are the same species, African cheetahs were physiologically different than Asians, both in proportions and in coats.  Will the Africans be able to adapt and thrive in an environment different from that which they came from?  There are also some concerns that, with so much conservation work remaining to be done in India, this isn’t the time to be adding a new endangered species to the mix, rather than focus on species already on the ground.  Is this conservation, then, or a feel-good story put out by a government that wants a win with environmentalists?

Ideally, the Asian subspecies would be used to repopulate India, if such a repopulation were going to occur.  But that might never prove possible – Iran’s cheetahs having been hanging on by a toenail for years – and this is a case in which using living animals is at least theoretically possible.  What of situations in which the animal in question is extinct.  Is it acceptable to use a “close enough” substitute to fill an ecological niche once held by an extinct animal?  Or do we, and the environment, have to move on?

I don’t know what the answer is.  The Indian government seems set to move ahead with the release of these cheetahs, so, for better or worse, cheetahs will soon be running across the grasslands of India for the first time in decades.  Whether they are ready for India – and whether India is really ready for them – is something that will remain to be seen.