Iran wants to learn from India’s Cheetah Revival Work: RTI

Iran showed interest in learning cheetah management from India. File | Image source: PTI

According to information received by the RTI app, Iran is working to save its rapidly declining Cheetah population, showing interest in learning Cheetah management from India.

Rajesh Gopal, chairman of the Government’s Cheetah Project Steering Committee, shared this information at a panel meeting in February.

“In a recent meeting, Iranian officials expressed interest in studying cheetah management in India,” the minutes quoted Gopal as saying. He also suggested that with an Indian-led initiative, the International Big Cat Alliance could engage with other cheetah-wide countries interested in understanding cheetah protection and management.

But when asked whether Iran is officially close to India in this regard, a senior official from the National Tiger Protection Agency said: “There is no such proposal at this juncture.” The government’s “Action Plan to Introduce Indian Cheetahs” also mentioned that India will be willing to assist Iran and the global protection community in its efforts to protect the severely endangered Iranian cheetahs.

Cheetah is the only large carnivore extinct in India, mainly due to overhunting and habitat loss. The last known cheetah in the country died in 1948 in Sal Forests in the district of Chhattisgarh’s Koriya.

India began discussions with Iran’s Shah in the 1970s to bring Asian cheetahs to India in exchange for Asian lions. However, considering the genetic similarity between Iranian and African cheetahs, it was later decided to use African species to reintroduce.

Since September 2022, India has translocated 20 African cheetahs as part of its global viewing reintroduction program, eight of which are from Namibia and 12 in South Africa.

Now, it will be divided into two stages and then get eight cheetahs from Botswana, which are expected to earn the top four in May this year.

Asian Cheetah, once found in Central and Southwest Asia, now only survives in Iran. Experts estimate that less than 30 are left in the wild. In January 2022, an Iranian minister told state media that the population dropped from about 100 to 12 in 2010.

According to researchers at the Iran Cheetah Association (ICS), an international government organization in Tehran, in the mid-1970s, as many as 400 Asian cheetahs roamed 400 Asian cheetahs.

Despite legal protections in the 1960s, Iran’s cheetahs remained under threat due to the decline of its major prey species, habitat loss and fragmentation, human wildlife conflict, especially after the Iranian Revolution in 1979 and the Iran-Iraq War.

Most of the remaining cheetah habitats in Iran are also rich in mineral resources, and international sanctions on Iran have caused economic hardships, causing some to hunt illegal and unregulated prey, researchers say.