A two-month-old cheetah cub died in Madhya Pradesh’s Kuno National Park on Tuesday, said wildlife authorities, reported The Indian Express.
The cub was one the four children born to female cheetah named Jwala, who is one of 20 felines translocated from South Africa and Namibia to India.
With the cub’s death, four cheetahs have now died in the park in less than two months. The first cheetah, Sasha, had died due to a kidney ailment on March 27. The second feline, Uday, died due to cardio-pulmonary failure on April 24. The third one, Daksha, died during a mating attempt on May 9.
On Tuesday, the wildlife authorities said that Jwala was spotted with all her cubs. However, they said, when Jwala started to walk, the fourth cub remained lying in its place.
“After a short stay by the monitoring team, the fourth cub was closely inspected,” the forest department said in a statement. “This cub was found lying on the ground unable to get up and even tried to raise its head after seeing the monitoring team.”
It said that the likely cause of death was “from weakness”, adding that the two-month old cub was the “smallest and weakest of the litter”, reported The Hindu.
“Generally, a weak cheetah cub is able to drink less milk than other cubs, due to which the expectation of its survival decreases and ultimately such cubs do not survive for a long time,” the statement said. “This whole process should be seen in the perspective of survival of the fittest.”
It added that literature and experience from Africa suggests that cheetah cubs, when living in the wild, have a survival rate of 10%.
“Only 1 in 10 cheetah cubs make it to adulthood in the wild,” a forest official told The Indian Express. “That is why the number of cubs born in general is the highest in cheetahs compared to other wild cat species.”
Last week, the Supreme Court had expressed concern about the deaths and asked the Centre to consider shifting the felines to an alternate location. The court, citing expert opinions and news articles about the deaths, had said that the Kuno National Park may not be sufficient to accommodate so many cheetahs.
The cheetahs were reintroduced to India seven decades after the species was declared extinct in the country. The cheetah was officially declared extinct by the Indian government in 1952. The wild cats were last recorded in the country in 1948, when three cheetahs were shot in the Sal forests in Chhattisgarh’s Koriya District.
In February, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had said that India has a chance to restore an element of biodiversity that had been lost long ago by reintroducing the felines.
However, experts say that India does not have the habitat or prey species for African cheetahs and that the project may not fulfil its aim of grassland conservation.
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