Poor Cheetahs at the Kuno National Park as it has been suspected, three more Cheetahs to have suffered maggot-infested neck wounds, apparently caused by GPS collars.

This has triggered a frantic scramble to locate the cheetahs and treat them even as the Madhya Pradesh government removed senior IFS officer Jasbir Singh Chouhan as the state’s chief wildlife warden on Monday.

Chouhan is due to retire in less than three months.

The back-to-back deaths of South African cheetahs Tejas and Suraj at Kuno have triggered global concerns.

Some suspected that infection from the neck wounds killed them although the ministry of environment and forests said five of the 20 translocated cheetahs at Kuno died due to “natural causes”.

It dismissed reports suggesting that Tejas and Suraj had succumbed to septicaemia due to neck injuries caused by the collar, and labelled such reports as “speculative, and lacking scientific evidence”.

There is a video of a large, infected neck wound on Suraj, who died on Saturday. Surprisingly, only male cheetahs at Kuno seem to be affected by the mysterious neck injury phenomenon.

Wildlife veterinarian Mike Toft, renowned for his experience in treating lions and cheetahs in South Africa, is arriving in Kuno on Tuesday to address the collar infection issue and aid in overall management, as reported by the TimesofIndia.

As reported by TOI cheetah Pawan was tranquillised and its radio collar was removed in a timely intervention that potentially saved his life. Flies had already lain eggs in its neck wound. If left untreated, maggots would have hatched and tunnelled into the cheetah’s brain or vital organs, leading to its death.

Despite all the efforts of the wildlife authorities, they have been unable to capture the cheetahs known as Elton and Freddie (Gaurav and Shaurya) to examine and treat their wounds.