DELHI: Three cheetah cubs have died in India this week, dealing yet another setback to a historic effort by the government to reintroduce the species to the country after 70 years of extinction.
According to CNN, the cubs were part of a litter of four born in late March to a cheetah named Siyaya, who was one of eight rehabilitated cheetahs brought from Namibia to India’s Kuno National Park, in Madhya Pradesh in September of the previous year.
Forest department officials said that the first cub died Tuesday, said JS Chauhan, chief conservator of the Forest Department of the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh, in an interview with local media. Over the next two days, two other cubs succumbed to “heat, dehydration and weakness.”
The latest deaths bring to six the number of cheetahs that have died since being reintroduced into India.
Siyaya gave birth to the cubs more than 70 years after cheetahs were declared extinct in India. It took a multi-step journey to get her and seven other cats from Namibia, on Africa’s southwestern coast, to central India.
Another 12 cheetahs arrived from South Africa in February.
But since then, three adult cheetahs died. One South African cheetah died during an attempt at courtship and mating, a Namibian cheetah died of kidney disease, and a South African cheetah died due to cardiac failure.
According to the Smithsonian National Zoo, cub mortality is high in both the wild and captivity. On average, 30 per cent of all cubs born in human care die within one month of birth, and in Tanzania’s Serengeti National Park, about 90 per cent die before reaching three months of age, the zoo officials said.
Cheetahs were declared extinct in India in 1952 and are the only large carnivore in the country to have suffered that fate.
According to the National Zoo that today, the spotted felines are most prevalent in Kenya and Tanzania in east Africa and Namibia and Botswana in southern Africa, But historically, the endangered cats had a more extensive range, roaming throughout central India, the Middle East, and most of sub-Saharan Africa.
