New Delhi, 1 Jun: India does not want fenced habitats for cheetahs like the ones in South Africa and Namibia as it is against the basic tenets of wildlife conservation, the head of the Centre\u2019s high-level committee set up to monitor the cheetah reintroduction project said on Thursday.
\nExperts from South Africa and Namibia, who are helping reintroduce cheetahs in India, have recommended fencing their habitats to prevent poaching, habitat fragmentation and minimise human-animal conflict.
\nHowever, experts in India say fences can disrupt natural animal movements and impede genetic exchange between populations.
\n\u201cIt\u2019s absolutely bogus to think of fencing the habitats. It goes against the basic tenets of wildlife conservation. What happened in a fenced park there (in Africa) will not happen here. Our understanding is that regional networks of protected areas should merge into a national network of protected areas so that there is porosity for wildlife gene flow,\u201d said Rajesh Gopal, chairman of the 11-member cheetah steering committee.
\n\u201cWe have our own socio-cultural issues. We have been handling tigers for the last 50 years and we know what the human-wildlife interface is. We can handle cheetahs too,\u201d he said.
\nSouth African wildlife expert Vincent van der Merwe, who is closely involved with the project, had earlier told PTI: \u201cThere has never been a successful reintroduction (of cheetahs) into an unfenced reserve in recorded history. It has been attempted 15 times in Africa and it failed every time.
\n\u201cWe are not advocating that India must fence all of its cheetah reserves, we are saying that just fence two or three and create source reserves to top up sink reserves.\u201d Source reserves are habitats that provide optimal conditions for reproduction of a particular species. These areas have abundant resources and favourable environmental conditions. They can support self-sustaining populations that produce a surplus of individuals, which can then disperse to other areas.
\nSink reserves, on the other hand, are habitats that have limited resources or environmental conditions that are less favourable for the survival or reproduction of a species. Sink reserves rely on dispersing individuals from source reserves to maintain their population numbers.
\nSeveral experts, even the Supreme Court, have expressed concerns over the lack of space and logistical support in the Kuno National Park and have suggested shifting cheetahs to other sanctuaries.
\nOfficials said the Gandhi Sagar Sanctuary, Madhya Pradesh, is being prepared as an alternative habitat for cheetahs by November.
\nUnion Environment Minister Bhupender Yadav on Monday said officers and employees involved in the conservation and management of cheetahs will be selected and sent on a study tour to Namibia and South Africa as part of the project.
\nThe central government will provide all necessary support, including financial resources, for the protection, conservation, promotion and a cheetah protection force, he said.
\nAccording to cheetah steering committee chairman Gopal, seven more cheetahs, including two females, will be released into the wild by the third week of June.
\nPrime Minister Narendra Modi released the first batch of eight spotted felines from Namibia into a quarantine enclosure at Kuno in Madhya Pradesh on September 17 last year.
\nIn the second such translocation, 12 cheetahs were flown in from South Africa and released into Kuno on February 18.
\nThree cheetahs died in March and April. Of the 17 remaining adult cheetahs, seven have already been released into the wild.
\nA female Nambian cheetah gave birth to four cubs in March. Three of them have died due to heat exposure and dehydration.
\nExperts involved in the project say the mortalities are within the normal range.
\nTo address the issue of cheetah-people interface, Gopal said a GIS-based landscape fragmentation analysis will be conducted to help the state authorities identify vulnerable areas.
\n\u201cWe cannot say the cheetahs will spend their entire lives in Kuno. They will enter human settlements and there will be some issues. We have to foresee and be ready for it,\u201d he said. (PTI)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
New Delhi, 1 Jun: India does not want fenced habitats for cheetahs like the ones in South Africa and Namibia as it is against the basic tenets of wildlife conservation, the head of the Centre\u2019s high-level committee set up to monitor the cheetah reintroduction project said on Thursday. Experts from South Africa and Namibia, who […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-217457","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-national"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/217457","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=217457"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/217457\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=217457"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=217457"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=217457"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}