Kuno National Park welcomes 12 South African cheetahs 

On Saturday, India welcomed 12 more cheetahs from South Africa, months after eight big cats were transported from Namibia. The second batch of cheetahs arrived at Gwalior’s air force station and were transported to Kuno National Park.

After a 10-hour flight from Johannesburg, South Africa, an IAF C-17 aircraft carrying the second batch of 12 Cheetahs landed at Air Force Station in Gwalior earlier today. These Cheetahs were later airlifted in IAF helicopters and the felines reached the Kuno National Park.

The cheetahs will be released into their quarantine enclosures by Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan and Environment Minister Bhupender Yadav.

Twelve cheetahs — five of them female –were flown in from South Africa, three years after India first mooted the idea. India and South Africa signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) in January 2022. For the first time in history, South Africa will be translocating 12 cheetahs to India as part of an initiative to expand the cheetah meta-population and to reintroduce the mammals in the country, the country’s forest department said on Twitter.

South Africa’s forest department shared a long Twitter thread showing how these cheetahs were darted and loaded into relocation crates before being re-located to Kuno.

The cheetahs will embark on the journey to Kuno from the O R Tambo International Airport in Gauteng on Friday evening, Bhupender Yadav told PTI. Ten quarantine bomas have been created at KNP for the 12 spotted felines.

A consultative workshop involving international cheetah experts, scientists, veterinarians, and forest officials will be held on February 20 at Kuno.

On his 72nd birthday last year, Prime Minister Narendra Modi released the first batch of eight spotted felines from Namibia into a quarantine enclosure at Kuno as part of the ambitious Cheetah reintroduction programme.

The ‘African Cheetah Introduction Project in India’ was conceived in 2009 but has been dormant for over a decade. The Covid-19 pandemic hampered the plan to introduce the cheetah in Kuno by November 2021.