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Inside view of customised jet used for bringing cheetahs home from Namibia | Video
An inside video of the special chartered cargo flight, which brought the eight cheetahs - five female and three male - is now doing the rounds on the internet. It shows the plane's cabin, where the cheetahs were housed.
Seven decades after cheetahs became extinct in India, Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Saturday welcomed eight big cats in Madhya Pradesh’s Sheopur district. The wild cats were brought from Namibia in Africa on a Boeing 747, kicking off the world’s first inter-continental cheetah translocation project.
An inside video of the special chartered cargo flight, which brought the eight cheetahs - five female and three male - is now doing the rounds on the internet. It shows the plane's cabin, where the cheetahs were housed.
Four boxes are placed in one section of the plane, while the other four are kept in another. The video was filmed seconds before the jet arrived in India, the narrator's voice suggests.
The eight cheetahs landed in Gwalior around 7am on the specialised plane from Namibia's capital Windhoek. The crates were loaded into an Indian Air Force (IAF) heavy-lift Chinook chopper at Gwalior and then flown to KNP in the presence of experts.
Also Read | 10 things to know about the 8 Namibian cheetahs flying to India on PM Modi's birthday
Veterinarians who accompanied the cheetah from Windhoek performed a thorough health examination. The veterinarians will stay at KNP for the next month to monitor the cheetahs' behaviour and health before releasing them into a six-square-kilometre soft-release habitat.
"These Cheetahs will help in restoring the grassland ecosystem and biodiversity will increase in the Kuno National Park. Eco-tourism and the possibility of development here will also increase in the coming days," Modi said after the launch of Project Cheetah
The cheetah became extinct from India owing to overhunting and diminishing grasslands, its natural habitat. The last cheetah was killed in the Chhattisgarh region of Koria in 1947, and it was declared extinct in 1952. Efforts to reintroduce the creature have been in the works for decades but always failed due to international diplomatic or legal obstacles, until now.
