Asiatic Lion Reintroduction Project

[Shardul]

The Kuno reintroduction project has nothing to do with inbreeding, more about having a back up population just in case something went horribly wrong with the original Gir population. In fact that would have created an even more inbred population, had the project gone through.

Genetic purity is something that people take very seriously, even when it comes to saving extremely rare species. You know when tigers vanished from Panna, they brought in tigers only from MP and not other areas, because they believe that tigers in that area are unique and it would not be proper to fill in tigers from other areas in order to maintain genetic purity. Same happened with Sariska.

Using a very closely related subspecies to supplement the endangered population is an idea that can succeed in theory, but that would mean the other lion population has to be almost identical to the Indian lions, in order for this experiment to succeed.

A related case would be of the Asiatic cheetah reintroduction project; the Indian govt was trying to recreate the extinct Indian cheetah by bringing in an Iranian cheetah pair. A deal couldn't be made with Iran because they asked for a pair of Asiatic lions in exchange for the cheetahs. Then after some time a study came up that showed that there was almost no difference between African and Iranian cheetahs and hence it was decided to use Namibian cheetahs for this project. I don't know what the current status is, but there were reports that a new habitat was being readied for the cheetahs. This was a few years back and I haven't heard anything about this project since then. Reply