African cheetahs were (disastrously) reintroduced into India, a habitat completely unsuitable for them, and clearly it’s going great!
Why do you think India is not a suitable habitat for them?
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.



