The death of South African cheetah 'Uday' in Madhya Pradesh's Kuno National Park (KNP) a day before was due to cardio-pulmonary failure as per preliminary assessment, a senior Forest department official said on Monday.
"As per the preliminary observation by veterinarians who performed the autopsy of the male cheetah, he died of cardio-pulmonary failure," Principal Chief Conservator of Forest (PCCF), Wildlife, J S Chauhan told PTI.
A full post-mortem report is awaited, he said.
'Uday', aged six years, was the second cheetah to die in KNP less than a month after the female cheetah, Sasha, aged more than four-and-a-half-years, died of a kidney ailment on March 27. The two fatalities brought down the number of translocated felines in KNP to 18.
An official release on Sunday said KNP officials found cheetah Uday sluggish in his boma (enclosure) and a closer inspection revealed he was staggering.
"As per the inspection conducted on Saturday evening, Uday was found healthy. During the inspection on Sunday morning, the medical team found that the cheetah was ailing. Following a due process, the cheetah was tranquilised on the advice of wildlife veterinarians and treatment was started at 11 AM," it said.
The cheetah was treated under the monitoring of wildlife vets and kept in the isolation ward but he died at around 4 PM, the release had said.
The deceased cheetah was one of the 12 felines translocated to KNP in Sheopur district from South Africa in February this year, five months after 8 Namibian cheetahs were shifted to the facility under the ambitious 'Project Cheetah'.
This project to reintroduce cheetahs in India was launched last September, decades after the species became extinct in the country.
The country's last cheetah died in Koriya district of present-day Chhattisgarh in 1947 and the species was declared extinct in 1952.
Another cheetah, named Siyaya, recently gave birth to four cubs in KNP.
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