Kochi: On Monday (March 27), a female cheetah that arrived from Namibia to Madhya Pradesh’s Kuno National Park died due to an infection in her kidneys, said the State Forest Department.The cheetah named ‘Sasha’ was one of the eight individuals brought to India on September 17 last year, to flag off India’s Project Cheetah which aims to introduce African cheetahs into parks in India.Renal infectionThe monitoring survey on March 22 found that Sasha was lethargic, the Madhya Pradesh Forest Department said in a press note. The three veterinary doctors surveilling the health of the cheetahs found that Sasha would need treatment. On the same day, the animal was quarantined.During the process the team also extracted blood to conduct tests. The tests, conducted in the Van Vihar National Park in Bhopal, revealed an infection in her kidneys, as per the note. The Van Vihar National Park sent wildlife veterinarians, along with a portable ultrasound machine, to Kuno.Senior scientists from the Wildlife Institute of India, Dehradun and the management of the Kuno National Park accessed the treatment history of the animal through the Cheetah Conservation Foundation of Namibia. This revealed that the final blood test conducted on the cheetah on August 31, 2022, in Namibia also contained high creatinine levels (more than 400). This shows that the cheetah had the infection even before it arrived in India, the Department said.However, the autopsy will reveal the real cause of death, a senior official told the IANS.From March 22 till the animal’s death on March 27, wildlife veterinarians and Namibian scientist Eli Walker treated the cheetah. The team spoke to several experts as they reviewed the animal’s health. The seven other cheetahs – including three males and a female that have been released in the wild in Kuno – are healthy, the note said.The five-year-old female named Sasha had shown signs of dehydration in January and had been isolated in a quarantine boma. Some reports put it down to renal failure and said her survival looked bleak.Concern not newSouth Africa’s agreement to ‘export’ cheetahs to India will result in an unjustifiable number of animals lost due to the translocation, and the loss of individuals due to “conditions in the destination habitat in India” is one of the concerns raised by the EMS Foundation, a rights and welfare group in South Africa.Their letter to South Africa’s minister for environment, forestry and fisheries Barbara Creecy says that an “unacceptable number” of cheetahs will be lost to several reasons including “having to deal with unfamiliar predators and the fact that the reserves in India are unfenced and cheetah are known to have a wide-range which will bring them into conflict with humans”.Based on this and other reasons including the ‘robustness’ of the scientific information based on which the decision was made to agree to the project, the EWS requested that “a precautionary approach be adopted” and the project be paused until the Department of Environment, Forestry and Fisheries has obtained public comments and more robust information regarding the effect of the project on the cheetah population in South Africa and on the welfare of the individual animals.Incidentally, authorities involved in the translocation have said that they expect high mortality rates within the first few years of the programme, according to The Print. However, they hoped for a “positive outcome once the population stabilises”.