|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Lieut-Gen Baljit Singh (retd) sheds the mystique around the big cat ONCE upon a time, India alone had the good fortune of being home to all the four "big cats" that is, the lion, the tiger, the leopard and the cheetah.
Then one tragic sunset in November 1947, the Raja of Kariwa, a small principality north of Bastar in Madhya Pradesh, spotted three pairs of eyes sparkling in the beam of his car’s headlamps. In less than a minute, the last three surviving Indian cheetahs were dispatched to oblivion to join the ranks of the dodo. A pompous letter from the ruler’s secretary describing the ghastly deed is on record. In north and south America, they have only two big cats, the jaguar and the puma. The jaguar resembles our leopard in looks, though a bit smaller but a far more vicious "killer". The puma, also called the caugar, is the larger version of our caracal even though the Americans call it their mountain lion. In Africa, the tiger has never existed among its big cats. On the Asian landmass, including Indonesia and Sri Lanka, the tiger was always the predominant cat and was found in 22 countries but presently restricted to 10 only. Likewise, the lion and the cheetah, which inhabited from Turkey through Persia (Iran) down to India, were by 1900 AD confined to India alone except for a few cheetahs in Persia. However, the leopard, which is the most cunning of them all, was and still maintains the largest presence in most of Asia. In India, the lion was the first of the big four whose numbers by 1903 were feared to be less than 20 surviving animals. Lord Curzon, India’s most flamboyant viceroy (and the only with university education), coerced and motivated the nawabs of Junagarh to staunch the lion’s further decline and create conditions for its revival. The tiger became the next object of slaughter. But for a fortuitous meeting between Guy Mountford (an American wildlife conservationist) and Indira Gandhi, the tiger may well have been exterminated from India by the 1980s. After a brief ray of hope, the tiger numbers have plummeted once again and may well have fallen below the "viable population" figure, already. But what of the Indian cheetah? Well, while the lion and then the tiger became the ultimate objects of hunting trophies and cult icons of the "Sport of Kings", the cheetah, on the other hand, fortunately caught the fancy, especially of the Mughal emperors, not as the "hunted" but rather as the prized instrument of hunting. It is universally believed that emperor Akbar had 1,000 hunting cheetahs in his stables, trained and adequately domesticated to be led on a leash much like pet dogs. A female cheetah, after a gestation period of a little over three months, may have a litter of up to four cubs. But more often than not, only two cubs may attain adulthood. The female is capable of having a second litter in the year but that is an exception than the rule. We also know that except in rare cases, the cheetahs do not breed in captivity. So for emperor Akbar to have gathered 1,000 hunting cheetahs (a fact never disputed), presumably all caught from the wilderness, their population in the wild in India must have been in lakhs, at the least. For a moment, just picture the cheetah in your mind: sleek, bright rufous-fawn pelt with innumerable bold black spots, the size of a two-rupee coin interspersed with smaller black dots and the close-knit spots on the long tail merged to appear as black rings but leaving the tip with a distinct, white powder-puff. On its rounded compact face runs a black stripe from the inner corner of the eyes down to the corner of its lips. And the overall body profile of the animal is that of a perfect thoroughbred, racing grey hound. No wonder that from a cold start, a cheetah accelerates in two seconds to 74 kmph, peaking to 110 kmph, it then cruises at a steady 90 kmph for 500m and all this in a span of a mere 10 seconds. When Akbar saw one of them leap clean a 20-foot wide ravine to hunt down a blackbuck on the far bank, the emperor had a special gold-leaf collar, studded with diamonds put around that cheetah’s slender neck. And to imagine that lakhs of these fastest animals on the earth ranged freely from the south of the Ganges, over western and central India down to Coimbatore, we must surely have been the chosen country of the gods. When Tipu Sultan fell in the battle at Srirangapatnam, the British gathered his enormous wealth and shipped it to England. But the British Commander, Col Sir Arthur Wellesley (later the Duke of Wellington), took five of Tipu’s best hunting cheetahs as his war booty. Wellesley was among the first to document the precise technique employed by the cheetah to hunt down its prey. Sadly, extinction is forever. No matter what heights of scientific attainment the Indian Institute of Molecular Biology, Hyderabad, has at its command, it cannot bring back the Indian cheetah. The idea of re-introducing the cheetah using the African strain or the Asiatic specimens in a zoo has been mooted recently, yet again. Not so long ago, George Schaller, arguably the greatest living wildlife biologist (especially of the great cats) when once approached with the proposal, had remarked: "Please show me the habitat and the prey base of the cheetah anywhere in India and I shall give my life to this project without any liabilities to the Government of India" or words to that effect. The cheetah in India is a beautiful memory. Let us cherish it as such. The need of the hour is to bend our hearts and souls to preserve the few remaining of the three big cats and all the other animals of India that survive today together with their habitats as a composite whole. There is no time left for partying. Is minister Jairam Ramesh listening?
|
|||
|
|
|||
