New Delhi: South African cheetah expert Vincent van der Merwe, who also advised India’s Project Cheetah, died on Sunday (March 16). According to sources, the 42-year-old died by suicide in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
Van der Merwe, who founded the Metapopulation Initiative in South Africa to conserve cheetah populations across African countries, was working with the Saudi Arabian government on a cheetah introduction project in the country, as per reports.
He was one of the few international experts who were on a panel that Indian authorities working on Project Cheetah took advice from.
While he reposed faith in India’s ambitious project to introduce African cheetahs to select grassland habitats in central India despite the deaths of several adult cheetahs, he did say that bureaucratic hurdles in India were difficult to deal with.
In an interview to the Times of India, van der Merwe had said that Indian bureaucrats being shifted from one post to another on a regular basis was “unsettling” for several reasons, including that “replacement bureaucrats are often unaware of their responsibilities and commitments to maintaining the relationship with South African bureaucrats”, and that “knowledge and understanding of wild cheetah management is lost and needs to be reestablished”.
He also noted that they observed “levels of hostility and professional jealousy towards highly talented Indian conservationists”, which he said was “extremely destructive to the project”.
He was also among four experts who wrote to the Supreme Court in 2023 in two separate letters regarding their concern with being kept in the dark about the management of Project Cheetah and the animals’ health.
In their letters, they noted that some of the adult cheetah deaths “could have been prevented by better monitoring of the animals and more appropriate” and timely “veterinary care” if the experts had been informed immediately rather than being “ignored” and used as mere “window-dressing”.
Later, however, van der Merwe dissociated himself from the letter.
