African cheetahs were (disastrously) reintroduced into India, a habitat completely unsuitable for them, and clearly it’s going great!

    • destructdisc@lemmy.worldOP
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      6 days ago

      They’re not native to India (these are African cheetahs, not Asiatic cheetahs, which are also not native to India but might theoretically fare better).

      The climate is wrong – India is a lot wetter than their native African savanna, with a prolonged heavy monsoon season they’re not used to. There are already cases of cheetahs developing infections from the near-constant moisture and humidity during the monsoons.

      The environment is wrong – Indian grasslands bear only a superficial resemblance to the savanna, but there are a lot more trees and underbrush, which is far from ideal for a predator that evolved to hunt with linear speed, especially one as fragile as a cheetah.

      There are also a LOT more apex predators (tigers, leopards, wolves, dholes) in the area they’ve been introduced to, so there’s a lot more competition for the same prey base. Cheetahs have a high enough failure rate as is in their home range, it gets significantly worse when they’re forced to compete with a higher density of predators they’re unfamiliar with.

      And none of this considers the human impact – India has a very high human and livestock population density on the fringes of protected forest areas. If a cheetah happens to wander outside the protected area and tries to hunt, there’s a very good chance people will kill it or seriously injure it to protect their livestock…or hit it with a car or a truck or something.