Eight cheetahs from African country Namibia were brought to India on the occasion of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s birthday . All these cheetahs are between 4 and 6 years old. Five cheetahs are females while three cheetahs are males. These cheetahs were released in the Kuno National Park in Madhya Pradesh . During this, PM Modi and MP Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan were present.
The cheetah has an ancient history in the country. The name ‘Cheetah’ is believed to have originated from the Sanskrit word Chitraka, which means ‘spotted’. The population of cheetahs in India used to be quite extensive. This animal was found from Lucknow in the north to Mysore in the south and from Kathiawar in the west to Deogarh in the east through Jaipur.
Maharaja Ramanuj Pratap hunted the last leopard: The cheetah is believed to have disappeared from the Indian landscape in 1947 when Maharaja Ramanuj Pratap Singh Deo of the princely state of Korea hunted and shot the last three Asiatic cheetahs in India. The cheetah was officially declared extinct by the Indian government in 1952. But now cheetahs have come to India again .
Cheetah extinct in these 14 countries: One of the main reasons for the extinction of the cheetah was its excessive hunting. Simultaneously, the number of cheetahs declined due to India’s emphasis on agriculture in the decades before independence as well as in the subsequent decades.
The cheetah became extinct in 14 other countries since the 1940s. These countries include Jordan, Iraq, Israel, Morocco, Syria, Oman, Tunisia, Saudi Arabia, Djibouti, Ghana, Nigeria, Kazakhstan, Pakistan and Afghanistan.
The objective behind introducing the cheetah is not only to restore India’s ‘historic evolutionary balance’, but also to develop a cheetah metapopulation that will help in global conservation of the animal.
