This is a segment from the film Life
with an Indian Prince. In 1939 two young Americans traveled to India to
experience the falconry practices of Indian royalty and to photograph
and film wildlife for National Geographic. In addition to hunting with
birds of prey, members of the royal party used to hunt with cheetahs.
This sport and way of life has disappeared into history. This rare
footage is quite unique, and most probably the only of its kind.
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Wow! This is amazing!· -
thanks for such a rare video bouju1·
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Damn nature u scary·
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Cheetahs in India?
Video summary of the recent efforts by the Wildlife Trust of India and the Wildlife Institute of India to reintroduce cheetahs into ...- HD
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India Cheetah Re-introduction
The Cheetah Conservation Fund CCF has been working on and advisory capacity with the Wildlife Trust of India and India's ...- HD
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India's Cheetah Restoration Plan Halted
BY XIAONAN WANG The Supreme Court of India has halted an ambitious project that would have imported cheetahs from Africa.
Govt plans to import African cheetah
The
first batch of cheetahs from Namibia was to reach India by mid-2012 and
was to be reintroduced in Madhya Pradesh's Kuno Palpur wildlife
sanctuary.
NEW DELHI: Armed with 'scientific evidence' that the African cheetah is 'not an alien species' and can survive in India, the government is planning to petition the Supreme Court to allow the import of the animal that became extinct 60 years ago.
The environment ministry's proposal comes after the apex court last month quashed the Rs 300 crore project to import and re-introduce the Namibian cheetah in India. The court had termed the environment ministery's decision as 'arbitrary and illegal' and a clear violation of the Wildlife Protection Act.
The first batch of cheetahs from Namibia was to reach India by mid-2012 and was to be reintroduced in Madhya Pradesh's Kuno Palpur wildlife sanctuary. But the idea was dropped after the apex court's slammed the ministry for poor planning.
Eager to import the cheetah, the ministry has now decided to present "scientific evidence" to support its project to import the lithe and one of the fastest animal.
"We have decided to approach the Supreme Court based on scientific evidence that the African cheetah is not alien to India and can survive here," a senior ministry official said on condition of anonymity.
The National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA), which is handling the programme, has called a meeting of the Project Cheetah task force on May 23.
"The task force will discuss it and give clearance," the official said. The task force will convey its decision to Environment Minister Jayanthi Natarajan. She will then give a go-ahead for the proposal to be convyed to the Supreme Court," the official said.
As the Supreme Court had rejected Kuno Palpur Wildlife Sanctuary for re-introducing the cheetah on various grounds, including the fact that the Asiatic lion from Gir is also being re-located there, the ministry has now proposed two new sites as the habitat for the cheetah.
"We are proposing Nauradehi Wildlife Sanctuaries (in Madhya Pradesh) and Shahgarh Landscape (in Jaisalmer in Rajasthan) after our first choice was rejected," the official said.
The sites were selected in 2009 based on a detailed study by the wildlife experts.
The official defended the earlier proposal of re-locating the cheetah, saying the apex court was "not properly appraised" about the scientific evidence that backed the project.
"The cheetah which existed in India is only genetically different from African Cheetah and not an alien species. It can survive in the sites that our wildlife experts have selected," the official said.
Today, the cheetah is found only in the arid regions of eastern Iran in Asia and in Botswana, Namibia and South Africa.
The project was the brainchild of former environment minister Jairam Ramesh, who had with great fanfare announced Project Cheetah in 2009. Soon after, a study was conducted by the Wildlife Trust of India (WTI) on where the cheetah could be housed.
The return of the cheetah would make India the only country in the world to host six of the world's eight large cats, including lions, tigers, jaguars, panthers and leopards.
India was once home to many cheetahs, but the last of them was killed in 1947. It was declared extinct in 1952. It is the only large animal to have been declared extinct in India in recorded history.
The cheetah, the smallest of the big cats, can run faster than any other animal on land, at more than 100 km per hour.
The maharaja of Surguja with his triple bounty: were these the last Indian cheetahs?
Bringing back an extinct species sounds like a Jurassic Park kind of venture, more worthy of our cinema screens than our wildlife reserves. But that’s the ambitious plan Jairam Ramesh endorsed last month, a triumphant trumpet blast, presumably to herald more exciting things to come, in the pursuit of his still-new calling as Union minister of environment and forests.
“The cheetah is the only animal to have been declared extinct in India in the last 100 years. We have to get them back from abroad to repopulate the species here,” Jairam had said then. The minister has now taken matters further by asking the Dehradun-based Wildlife Institute of India (WII) to suggest six possible sites for reintroduction. His action follows a meeting convened in Gajner by the WII, which concluded that this dream—to see the cheetah racing across our grasslands once again—can (and ought to) be fulfilled.
“It’s
not a final course of action,” admits WII chairman Dr M.K. Ranjitsinh,
“But after preliminary surveys we have concluded that it’s feasible.”
While previously, there had been talk of captive breeding, the emphasis
has now shifted to translocation of cheetahs; not from Iran, where their
numbers have dwindled to below 100, but from Africa, where there are
said to be 12,000 spread over 25 countries. There is some scepticism
about bringing the African cheetah to grasslands where its younger
descendant, the Asiatic cheetah, once roamed. But Ranjitsinh counters,
“The greatest authority on DNA analysis in wildlife, Stephen J.O. Brian,
told us there should be no objection, genetically, to bringing in
African cheetahs.” However, the plan will need to be fine-tuned. “Before
we formally present this plan to the ministry, we’ll need to do some
further, detailed investigation of the release sites,” says Ranjitsinh.
Just
a couple of hundred years ago, the cheetah was zipping across
grasslands extending through the length and breadth of India, from
Chhattisgarh to Tamil Nadu and Kerala. Quite unusually for a big cat,
the cheetah is docile and gentle, easy to tame. In the 1500s, the Mughal
emperor Akbar had more than a thousand stowed away in his shikarkhanas
to help catch the preferred prey—blackbucks—on royal hunts.
A film shot as recently as 1939 depicts one such royal hunt: keepers get on to bullock carts, their cheetahs on leashes. The carts trundle along the plains to the grasslands, where the cats are offloaded in the midst of blackbuck herds. They are allowed to chase down and tumble around in the dust till they have a grip on their prey’s delicate neck. At which point, to their utmost indignation, hoods are unceremoniously pulled over their heads, the neck of the deer is slit, and they are left the paltry trophy of one bony limb of the dead animal.
Owners kept their cheetahs well, regarding them as feline versions of their hunting dogs. But the animal’s near-inability to reproduce in captivity contributed to the depletion in their numbers. Moreover, the hunter was also the hunted, thanks to the colonial fashion for cheetah-fur coats, rugs, and “shikar trophies”. Many a colonial officer has written shocking accounts of blasting off the backs of graceful cheetahs tranquilly loping through a clearing; or boasted, with “manly” pride, of bearing down on them on horseback and spearing them.
The trophy of shame for the most low-down, wicked act of cheetah destruction goes to the Maharaja of Surguja (a principality in eastern MP)—who also killed 1,360 tigers. While motoring through the countryside one night in 1948, he chanced upon three cheetah siblings sitting together. Gleefully blinding them with his headlights, he shot them down on the spot at close range and photographed himself with his “trophies”, which were quite possibly the last surviving cheetahs in India, aside from a stray, unconfirmed sighting in 1968.
Since it was arrant human villainy that was responsible for the cheetah’s disappearance from India’s grasslands, talk of bringing it back has a redemptive ring to it. That’s why it has attracted a rainbow coalition of supporters, including, in 2003, ambitious scientists (of the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology) looking to clone a Dolly that roars—or at least, makes a low, “sawing” noise, as cheetahs do. The scientists failed—and not just because Iran turned down our request for genetic material. Their plan was aborted when other scientists and ecologists denounced the arrogance of playing God, and the foolhardiness of the expensive venture: no wild animal had ever been successfully cloned before.
This time around, the plan sounds somewhat more plausible: suitable re-release sites would be shortlisted, and when they were made secure, a closely supervised ‘soft release’ would be conducted of cheetahs procured from Namibia. “We’ve lost a species, we should try to bring it back,” asserts Divyabhanusinh Chavda, trustee of WWF-India and author of the book The End of the Trail: The Cheetah in India. “Let’s bring them from Namibia; they’re being shot there anyway. It will also help conserve the grasslands, they’re in a semi-degraded state.”
That, some conservationists would argue, is putting it mildly, considering most of India’s grasslands have turned into farmlands or human settlements. “Is the area even available?” asks Ravi Chellam, head of the Wildlife Conservation Society. “That’s why we need to conduct a solid, well-conceived field survey, assessing availability of suitable habitat and prey animals, and inventorying human use. Without this, if we introduce a predator in a country teeming with livestock, we’re opening a Pandora’s box of new conflicts.”
Asad Rahmani, head of the Bombay Natural History Society, is more sanguine. “The Desert National Park of Jaisalmer-Barmer would do, but it has nearly 70 villages and settlements which would need to be relocated. That’s politically unfeasible. Shaka-Bulge in Jaisalmer has pure grasslands too, but the military might object as it’s near the border.”
There are other, tricky questions to consider: are these protected areas protected enough? Do they have a reasonably large prey base? Do they have reasonably low human interference?
Dr Ranjitsinh, for his part, is convinced that a resoundingly positive answer is possible for every one of these questions. “It’s just the beginning of a process. But it’s a very heartening one.” We can only hope he’s right.
The environment ministry's proposal comes after the apex court last month quashed the Rs 300 crore project to import and re-introduce the Namibian cheetah in India. The court had termed the environment ministery's decision as 'arbitrary and illegal' and a clear violation of the Wildlife Protection Act.
The first batch of cheetahs from Namibia was to reach India by mid-2012 and was to be reintroduced in Madhya Pradesh's Kuno Palpur wildlife sanctuary. But the idea was dropped after the apex court's slammed the ministry for poor planning.
Eager to import the cheetah, the ministry has now decided to present "scientific evidence" to support its project to import the lithe and one of the fastest animal.
"We have decided to approach the Supreme Court based on scientific evidence that the African cheetah is not alien to India and can survive here," a senior ministry official said on condition of anonymity.
The National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA), which is handling the programme, has called a meeting of the Project Cheetah task force on May 23.
"The task force will discuss it and give clearance," the official said. The task force will convey its decision to Environment Minister Jayanthi Natarajan. She will then give a go-ahead for the proposal to be convyed to the Supreme Court," the official said.
As the Supreme Court had rejected Kuno Palpur Wildlife Sanctuary for re-introducing the cheetah on various grounds, including the fact that the Asiatic lion from Gir is also being re-located there, the ministry has now proposed two new sites as the habitat for the cheetah.
"We are proposing Nauradehi Wildlife Sanctuaries (in Madhya Pradesh) and Shahgarh Landscape (in Jaisalmer in Rajasthan) after our first choice was rejected," the official said.
The sites were selected in 2009 based on a detailed study by the wildlife experts.
The official defended the earlier proposal of re-locating the cheetah, saying the apex court was "not properly appraised" about the scientific evidence that backed the project.
"The cheetah which existed in India is only genetically different from African Cheetah and not an alien species. It can survive in the sites that our wildlife experts have selected," the official said.
Today, the cheetah is found only in the arid regions of eastern Iran in Asia and in Botswana, Namibia and South Africa.
The project was the brainchild of former environment minister Jairam Ramesh, who had with great fanfare announced Project Cheetah in 2009. Soon after, a study was conducted by the Wildlife Trust of India (WTI) on where the cheetah could be housed.
The return of the cheetah would make India the only country in the world to host six of the world's eight large cats, including lions, tigers, jaguars, panthers and leopards.
India was once home to many cheetahs, but the last of them was killed in 1947. It was declared extinct in 1952. It is the only large animal to have been declared extinct in India in recorded history.
The cheetah, the smallest of the big cats, can run faster than any other animal on land, at more than 100 km per hour.
The maharaja of Surguja with his triple bounty: were these the last Indian cheetahs?
Bringing back an extinct species sounds like a Jurassic Park kind of venture, more worthy of our cinema screens than our wildlife reserves. But that’s the ambitious plan Jairam Ramesh endorsed last month, a triumphant trumpet blast, presumably to herald more exciting things to come, in the pursuit of his still-new calling as Union minister of environment and forests.
“The cheetah is the only animal to have been declared extinct in India in the last 100 years. We have to get them back from abroad to repopulate the species here,” Jairam had said then. The minister has now taken matters further by asking the Dehradun-based Wildlife Institute of India (WII) to suggest six possible sites for reintroduction. His action follows a meeting convened in Gajner by the WII, which concluded that this dream—to see the cheetah racing across our grasslands once again—can (and ought to) be fulfilled.
|
Just
a couple of hundred years ago, the cheetah was zipping across
grasslands extending through the length and breadth of India, from
Chhattisgarh to Tamil Nadu and Kerala. Quite unusually for a big cat,
the cheetah is docile and gentle, easy to tame. In the 1500s, the Mughal
emperor Akbar had more than a thousand stowed away in his shikarkhanas
to help catch the preferred prey—blackbucks—on royal hunts.A film shot as recently as 1939 depicts one such royal hunt: keepers get on to bullock carts, their cheetahs on leashes. The carts trundle along the plains to the grasslands, where the cats are offloaded in the midst of blackbuck herds. They are allowed to chase down and tumble around in the dust till they have a grip on their prey’s delicate neck. At which point, to their utmost indignation, hoods are unceremoniously pulled over their heads, the neck of the deer is slit, and they are left the paltry trophy of one bony limb of the dead animal.
Owners kept their cheetahs well, regarding them as feline versions of their hunting dogs. But the animal’s near-inability to reproduce in captivity contributed to the depletion in their numbers. Moreover, the hunter was also the hunted, thanks to the colonial fashion for cheetah-fur coats, rugs, and “shikar trophies”. Many a colonial officer has written shocking accounts of blasting off the backs of graceful cheetahs tranquilly loping through a clearing; or boasted, with “manly” pride, of bearing down on them on horseback and spearing them.
The trophy of shame for the most low-down, wicked act of cheetah destruction goes to the Maharaja of Surguja (a principality in eastern MP)—who also killed 1,360 tigers. While motoring through the countryside one night in 1948, he chanced upon three cheetah siblings sitting together. Gleefully blinding them with his headlights, he shot them down on the spot at close range and photographed himself with his “trophies”, which were quite possibly the last surviving cheetahs in India, aside from a stray, unconfirmed sighting in 1968.
Since it was arrant human villainy that was responsible for the cheetah’s disappearance from India’s grasslands, talk of bringing it back has a redemptive ring to it. That’s why it has attracted a rainbow coalition of supporters, including, in 2003, ambitious scientists (of the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology) looking to clone a Dolly that roars—or at least, makes a low, “sawing” noise, as cheetahs do. The scientists failed—and not just because Iran turned down our request for genetic material. Their plan was aborted when other scientists and ecologists denounced the arrogance of playing God, and the foolhardiness of the expensive venture: no wild animal had ever been successfully cloned before.
This time around, the plan sounds somewhat more plausible: suitable re-release sites would be shortlisted, and when they were made secure, a closely supervised ‘soft release’ would be conducted of cheetahs procured from Namibia. “We’ve lost a species, we should try to bring it back,” asserts Divyabhanusinh Chavda, trustee of WWF-India and author of the book The End of the Trail: The Cheetah in India. “Let’s bring them from Namibia; they’re being shot there anyway. It will also help conserve the grasslands, they’re in a semi-degraded state.”
That, some conservationists would argue, is putting it mildly, considering most of India’s grasslands have turned into farmlands or human settlements. “Is the area even available?” asks Ravi Chellam, head of the Wildlife Conservation Society. “That’s why we need to conduct a solid, well-conceived field survey, assessing availability of suitable habitat and prey animals, and inventorying human use. Without this, if we introduce a predator in a country teeming with livestock, we’re opening a Pandora’s box of new conflicts.”
Asad Rahmani, head of the Bombay Natural History Society, is more sanguine. “The Desert National Park of Jaisalmer-Barmer would do, but it has nearly 70 villages and settlements which would need to be relocated. That’s politically unfeasible. Shaka-Bulge in Jaisalmer has pure grasslands too, but the military might object as it’s near the border.”
There are other, tricky questions to consider: are these protected areas protected enough? Do they have a reasonably large prey base? Do they have reasonably low human interference?
Dr Ranjitsinh, for his part, is convinced that a resoundingly positive answer is possible for every one of these questions. “It’s just the beginning of a process. But it’s a very heartening one.” We can only hope he’s right.
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Damn nature u scary·
3 Tipu's cheetah
©The British Library, London (OIOC)One of Tipu�s Hunting Cheetah; Seringapatam, 1799
Watercolour 32 x 61 cm.
Unknown Indian Artist for the Marquis Wellesley.
he Persian inscription reads: 'Drawn from the Life from a Cheeta that was found in the Palace of Tippoo Sultan at Seringapatam 1799.' Hunting with cheetahs is an ancient Indian sport, especially for the nobility. For Tipu, the elegance, power and decisiveness of these animals was undoubtedly equated with his own image as 'The Tiger of Mysore.' In order to accommodate the beast's extended tail, the artist has attached a second sheet of paper. A companion watercolour, with the tail curled inwards, is also in the British Library, London (OIOC) (No.: NHD 32 f.4).
Benjamin Sydenham was appointed in 1799 to prepare a memorandum on Tipu's sixteen hunting cheetahs. Each had in its retinue a chief huntsman with assistant, one cart, four bullocks and four men. Six or eight cheetahs rode in procession to the appointed hunting ground and remained hooded until within four to five hundred yards of their prey (deer or antelope). After the chase, the cheetah held down its prey which was killed by the Meer Shikar (chief huntsman). Three of Tipu's hunting cheetahs, six keepers, two transport bullocks and a cart were sent as a present to George III after the Fall of Seringapatam. They were not the first hunting cheetahs to reach Britain. George Pigot, Governor of Madras (1755-63) sent a cheetah home as a gift to the King, and the beast was exhibited in the Royal Park at Windsor. It flatly refused to perform any great feats, but a splendid portrait of the cheetah, with its two Indian attendants, was painted by George Stubbs, one of the greatest animal painters of the 18 century. Pigot's cheetah wears the characteristic red hood, not shown in the Indian watercolour, and also the red girdle by which the attendant could control the Cheetah. This is clearly visible in the watercolour.
