Eight Cheetahs From Botswana Set to Arrive at Kuno National Park

Bhopal: Eight cheetahs from Botswana are going to land in the Kuno National Park (KNP) in Madhya Pradesh’s Sheopur district in February. The eight cheetahs from Botswana are set to be shifted to the KNP by the third week of February, a senior forest officer of the park said on Sunday. The eight cheetahs have already been identified for translocation to Kuno and are currently quarantined at the Mokolodi Nature Reserve near Gaborone, Botswana, the forest officer said. The cheetahs from the African country will be first kept in the quarantine enclosures established in the KNP on their arrival there and later shifted to the large enclosures before being released in the wild in the park, he added. Sources said that a three-member delegation from the department of wildlife and national parks (DWNP) under ministry of environment and tourism, Botswana, visited the KNP last month for assessment of the on-ground readiness for translocation of eight cheetahs. The delegation inspected the animal holding enclosures, and veterinary infrastructure in the park, the forest officer said, unwilling to be quoted. The delegation also visited Gandhi Sagar Wildlife Sanctuary in Madhya Pradesh where three cheetahs were shifted a few months ago from the KNP. Eight cheetahs from Namibia and 12 more from South Africa were translocated to the KNP under the cheetah reintroduction project in a gap of six months around three years ago. Kuno currently houses 29 cheetahs. Cheetah was officially declared extinct in India in 1952.