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Cheetah cub that had strayed outside Kuno National Park killed after being hit by vehicle

Scroll | December 8, 2025 4:40 PM CST

A 20-month-old cheetah cub from Madhya Pradesh’s Kuno National Park was killed on Sunday after being hit by a vehicle on the Agra-Mumbai National Highway in Gwalior district.

This is the second cheetah death from Kuno in three days. On Friday, another cub had been found dead, a day after it was released into the wild with its mother and sibling.

The cub killed on Sunday was one of two male cheetahs born in India to Gamini, a cheetah from South Africa. They had wandered outside Kuno’s boundaries nearly a month ago, The Hindu quoted forest officials as saying.

Project Cheetah Director Uttam Kumar Sharma said in a statement that the “tracking team and local forest staff were continuously monitoring both cubs”. He added that the accident happened suddenly, even as the tracking team attempted to stop the speeding vehicle from hitting the cheetah.

The vehicle involved in the accident was detained in Rajasthan’s Kota district.

A team from Kuno is on its way to Kota to question the driver and collect samples from the vehicle, Madhya Pradesh Additional Principal Chief Conservator of Forests-Wildlife L Krishnamoorthy told The Hindu.

With this, Kuno now has 27 cheetahs, eight adults and 19 cubs.

Since 2023, at least 17cheetahs have died.

In September 2022, cheetahs were reintroduced under Project Cheetah to India seven decades after the species was declared...