Indian wildlife authorities on Monday decided to assess all cheetahs in the Kuno National Park for signs of collar-related skin inflammation, a day after describing as “speculation and hearsay” veterinarians’ suggestions that fly infestations near collars had killed two cheetahs.
The decision to evaluate all cheetahs taken at a meeting of the National Tiger Conservation Authority is in line with recommendations by the veterinarians but discordant with the NTCA’s Sunday’s statement that all deaths of cheetahs in Kuno had been outcomes of “natural causes,” wildlife experts said.
“Nobody in the NTCA meeting today questioned whether the collar issue is true or not. They agreed that it is the issue and that action needs to be taken,” Adrian Tordiffe, a cheetah specialist in South Africa told The Telegraph. “All cheetahs, including the 11 in the unfenced areas will be assessed and moved back into enclosures or under quarantine, according to their needs,” said Tordiffe, an associate professor at the University of Pretoria who joined Monday’s meeting online. “The decision whether to remove collars will be taken on a case-by-case basis.”
The NTCA’s Sunday’s statement, which had surprised sections of experts who view it as an attempt to obfuscate the circumstances of some of the cheetah deaths, also drew criticism on Monday from former Union environment minister Jairam Ramesh. “The statement is clearly a political one, intended to whitewash management failures and mocks conservation science,” Ramesh tweeted. “There appears to be enough evidence to expose the NTCA statement,” he wrote.
Five of the 20 adult cheetahs the ministry brought into Kuno from Africa and three of the four cubs born in Kuno have died since March this year. The NTCA’s statement said: “… as per the preliminary analysis all mortalities are due to natural causes.”
Multiple experts have told this newspaper that it is “misleading” to label at least three of the five adult cheetah deaths as the outcome of natural causes and that the NTCA’s statement defies the principles of honesty and transparency critical to science.
“I just don’t understand the objective of the statement,” one of the experts said. The statement, the expert said, appears to reflect either some “imagined or real pressure” on the NTCA or the NTCA’s limited capacity to communicate complex conservation challenges to the public.
Queries from this newspaper to two cheetah project officials seeking information about the Monday meeting have not evoked any response.
Some experts cited in this news report requested anonymity because they are engaged in the project and said they did not wish to appear to be criticising the statement from the NTCA, a Union environment ministry agency that is implementing the project.
A South African female cheetah had died in early May after she was injured by two males placed within her fenced enclosure by Kuno wildlife staff to nudge the cheetahs into mating.
While cheetahs in the wild are known to fight during mating, experts say the female’s death could not be described as “natural” because she had been placed within a fenced enclosure with two males.
“The female cheetah was injured horribly — in an open unfenced area, she might have had a chance to escape,” one expert said. “There is no way we can describe her death as natural.”
Likewise, the two South African male cheetahs that died last week had fly maggot infestations near their neck collars that hold radio transmitters used to track their movements.
Veterinarians who have seen the sites and patterns of the infestations along the neck and the backs of the two cheetahs are convinced that the infestations had led to bacterial infections and septicemia (blood poisoning) causing their deaths.
Official transferred
The Madhya Pradesh government on Monday transferred the state’s chief wildlife warden and head of the cheetah project Jasbir Singh Chauhan, without citing reasons, stirring speculation in wildlife circles about whether the transfer was connected to the cheetah deaths.
