New Delhi: The Kuno National Park in Madhya Pradesh welcomed its first set of baby cheetahs on Wednesday as one of the Namibian cheetahs gave birth to 4 cubs. The cheetah named Siyaya gave birth to 4 healthy cubs, reports said. The development comes just days after the demise of one of cheetahs named Sasha, due to kidney disease.
The happy news was shared by Union Minister Bhupender Yadav. He also tweeted photos & videos of new born cubs on Twitter.
All these cheetahs were introduced to MP’s Kuno National Park from Namibia, as part of Cheetah reintroduction program. A total of 8 cheetahs were brought from Namibia last year and released by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in the Kuno National Park. Later, another set of cheetahs were released in the Kuno Park by Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan.
Union Environment Minister Bhupender Yadav announced that one of the cheetahs relocated to India from Namibia had four cubs. He termed it a momentous event in India’s wildlife conservation history during ‘Amrit Kaal’.
“I am delighted to share that four cubs have been born to one of the cheetahs translocated to India on 17th September 2022, under the visionary leadership of PM Shri @narendramodi ji (sic),” he tweeted. The minister congratulated the entire team of Project Cheetah for their relentless efforts in bringing back the large carnivore to India and for their efforts in correcting an ecological wrong done in the past.
Under the ambitious Cheetah reintroduction programme, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had released the first batch of eight spotted felines — five females and three males — from Namibia into a quarantine enclosure at Kuno in Madhya Pradesh on his 72nd birthday on September 17 last year.
Five-year-old female Namibian cheetah `Sasha`, who reportedly died due to serious renal (kidney related) on Monday, her ailment was first detected in the last week of January, three month after she along with seven other big cats were released at Madhya Pradesh`s Kuno National Park (KNP).
According to sources in the state Forest Department, Sasha was spotted lying lazily in her big enclosure on January 23, after which the three doctors team had shifted her for treatment at a quarantine `Boma` (small enclosure).
Since then, veterinary doctors in coordination with their counterparts in Namibia and South Africa, were administering treatment to the female Cheetah and were monitoring her daily activities closely.
Cheetah is the only large carnivore that got completely wiped out from India due to over-hunting and habitat loss. The last cheetah died in Koriya district of present-day Chhattisgarh in 1947 and the species was declared extinct in 1952.
