Everyone loves a good chital death

There is grief, anger and horror in the chital world since Monday morning. The spotted deer population has come to realise that being plentiful, with no worry of being endangered, can be a curse. What they can’t fathom is how the killing of one of their own by two immigrant cheetahs, who had settled down at Madhya Pradesh‘s Kuno National Park in September, is being celebrated all around – and not just by cheetahs, but also by humans who control the news narrative. On Monday, two of these predators recently emigrated from Namibia brought down a chital who had no inkling that it was prey, as it had no prior experience of cheetahs. The bigotry against the deer by humans was evident on many levels, including the names given to the two killers ‘Elton’ and ‘Freddie’ – in honour of very popular human singers Elton John and Freddie Mercury – while not bothering to give the name of the murdered victim.

This cheetah supremacism was even evident in the way much of the human media spelt chital – as ‘cheetal’ – clearly to replicate the coloniser-colonised dynamics at the level of language itself. While much celebration is on after ‘the first time a cheetah has successfully hunted in India in over 75 years’, not a line of condolence has been paid to the victim’s family, which has fallen prey to yet another instance of ugly inter-species politics.