Cheetah reintroduction in India

Reintroduction of the cheetah in India involves the artificial re-establishment of a population of cheetahs into areas where they had previously existed but were hunted into extinction by the British colonial officers and Indian royalty. A part of the reintroduction process is the identification and restoration of their former grassland scrub forest habitats. This is within the scope of the duties of the local forest department of each State, where relocation occurs, through the use of Indian Central Government funding.

Until the 20th century, the Asiatic cheetah was quite common and roamed all the way from Israel, the Arabian Peninsula to Iran, Afghanistan and India. In India, they ranged as far south as the Tirunelveli district of Tamil Nadu. The Asiatic cheetah, also known as the "hunting leopard" in India was kept by kings and princes to hunt gazelle; the Moghul emperor Akbar kept them for hunting gazelle and blackbucks. He was said to have had 1,000 cheetahs at one time for assisting in his royal hunts. Trapping of large numbers of adult Indian cheetahs, who had already learned hunting skills from wild mothers, for assisting in royal hunts is said to be another major cause of the species rapid decline in India as they never bred in captivity with only one record of a litter ever.

By the beginning of the twentieth century, the species was already heading for extinction in many areas. The last physical evidence of the Asiatic cheetah in India was thought to be three, all shot by the Maharajah Ramanuj Pratap Singh Deo of Surguja in 1947, in eastern Madhya Pradesh or northern Chhattisgarh, a man also noted for holding a record for shooting 1,360 tigers, but a female was sighted in Koriya district, in what is now Chhattisgarh, in 1951.

In India in the mid-20th century, prey was abundant, and cheetahs fed on the blackbuck, the chinkara, and sometimes the chital and the nilgai.

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