Bengaluru: Following the death of a juvenile cheetah due to firearm injuries sustained near Madhya Pradesh’s Kuno National Park, the Union government has constituted a high-level team to investigate the incident.The team will include the inspector general of forests and officials of the Wildlife Crime Control Bureau (WCCB), the Union environment ministry announced in a press statement on Wednesday (October 28), adding that the team would work along with state authorities already looking into the matter.The death of the cheetah is clearly a management failure and the outcome of the government disregarding well-meaning cautionary advice, big cat expert Ravi Chellam told The Wire. Scientists including Chellam had cautioned, even before the launch of Project Cheetah, that negative interactions between cheetahs and local communities could be a problem as cheetahs are wide-ranging animals and Kuno would be too small for them. High-level team to investigate cheetah deathThe cheetah that died on the morning of Tuesday (October 27) was a 19-month-old male born on Indian soil to African cheetah Nirva (which was brought to India from South Africa in February 2023). An official statement from the Kuno field director on Monday (October 26) had stated that park authorities rescued the animal from Morena forest division on Sunday (this changed to Sheopur forest division in subsequent press notes, dated October 27 and the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change or MoEFCC’s statement on October 28) around 100 km away from the boundaries of Kuno National Park where India’s ambitious Project Cheetah is underway. The Project aims to introduce African cheetahs (a different subspecies from the Asian cheetahs that India was home to till the 1950s until the animals were hunted to extinction) into select grassland habitats in central India.The animal was found injured and was taken to Kuno, then later shifted to the Department of Veterinary Surgery and Radiology, Nanaji Deshmukh Veterinary Science University (NDVSU), Jabalpur, for “detailed investigation and intensive treatment”, the state’s Chief Wildlife Warden Samita Rajora had said in a press note on October 27. Veterinarians retrieved five firearm pellets from the animal’s body during surgery but the animal did not survive despite these medical interventions, authorities said. Local sources had told The Wire that the cheetah also suffered several broken bones but the official statement did not mention this.Instead, medical examinations corroborated multiple internal injuries associated with the recovered firearm pellets, the MoEFCC said in its press note on October 28.“The Union government has taken serious note of the death of a 19-month-old male Cheetah (KNG22) of Kuno National Park, Madhya Pradesh, due to firearm pellet injuries,” it said. “Viewing the matter with utmost gravity, the Centre has deputed a high-level team for an on-ground investigation into the incident, given the critical importance of Project Cheetah and the need to ensure the highest standards of protection for the reintroduced population of the Big Cat.”The team will comprise the inspector general of forests, National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA), additional director, WCCB, and regional deputy director, WCCB. “The team has been tasked with undertaking a thorough investigation into the circumstances leading to the death of the Cheetah, examining all available evidence and coordinating closely with the Madhya Pradesh Forest Department to ensure strict and swift action in the matter,” it added.The state government has already constituted a Special Task Force (STF), comprising forest and police officers, to investigate the incident. The central team deputed by the MoEFCC will work in coordination with the state machinery and examine the implementation of security protocols, as well as monitoring and protection measures being undertaken to avoid any such incident in future. The central team will submit its findings and recommendations to the ministry for further directions to the state government and field authorities, but the statement does not say when this will be done.But local wildlife activist Ajay Dubey says that a high-level investigation alone will not do. He told The Wire that he has petitioned the Madhya Pradesh high court to order the Union government to initiate a Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) inquiry into the cheetah death. Predictions coming trueWhen knowledge is ignored and well meant criticism is disregarded, such outcomes are guaranteed, said Chellam, Bengaluru-based wildlife biologist and conservation scientist, referring to how he and several other experts had always maintained even before the launch of Project Cheetah that negative interactions between cheetahs and local communities could be a problem. On the day that the first set of African cheetahs arrived in India, statistician and big cat population expert Arjun Gopalaswamy had told The Wire that with no fences around the 748 sq. km Kuno National Park to keep the cheetahs in, the animals could reach nearby villages and that there was a high chance of conflict with people (through livestock depredation). “We’ll just have to wait and see,” he had said. That prediction has already come true. In August last year, authorities darted and captured female adult cheetah Jwala after it killed a goat in a village near Ranthambore Tiger Reserve in the neighbouring state of Rajasthan, and attempted to eat it. Drama ensued, with officials having to tug the dead goat from the cheetah’s jaws. They took the animal back to Kuno National Park, where it was free-ranging in the wild before it crossed human-dominated landscapes and entered Rajasthan. Barely a month after the first cheetahs came in, Chellam and seven other scientists who have studied carnivores and their habitats in Asia and Africa (including tiger expert Ullas Karanth and Gopalaswamy) wrote in a letter that introducing African cheetahs to India was an “ill-advised conservation attempt”. One of the primary reasons they gave was that the government’s estimate, that Kuno’s cheetah carrying capacity based on the availability of prey was 21 cheetahs across its 748 sq. km area (around three cheetahs per 100 sq. km), was too much. Cheetahs need a lot of space and introducing more cheetahs would mean that the animals would range outside the Park, and into villages and other human-dominated areas nearby. They had specified very clearly that they anticipated that “adopting such a speculative and unscientific approach will lead to human–cheetah conflicts, death of the introduced cheetahs or both, and will undermine other science-based species recovery efforts, both globally and within India”.In March 2025, people pelted African cheetah Jwala and her four cubs with stones after the big cats tried to hunt a calf on farmland outside Kuno.The latest cheetah death is more proof of the scientists’ predictions coming true.“This is clearly a management failure at some level of the much talked about 24×7 monitoring of the free ranging cheetahs,” Chellam told The Wire on October 28, commenting on the Union government having to form a high-level team to investigate the cheetah death. “Such events including the earlier death of a cheetah in a road accident are also in line with what was predicted much before the first batch of cheetahs arrived in September 2022. Kuno is too small in size to establish a wild population of a wide-ranging species like the cheetah. It was expected that the introduced cats will range in human-dominated habitats which is likely to result in conflicts. These predictions were based on the ecology and behaviour of cheetahs. Such well-meant cautionary advice was totally disregarded,” he added.