The death of four cheetah cubs at Kuno National Park has delivered a sharp setback to India’s ambitious rewilding programme. Born on April 11 to a female known as KGP12, the cubs were the country’s first wild-born cheetahs since the species was reintroduced from Namibia in 2022. Their half-eaten carcasses were found near their den on May 12, and field officials attribute the deaths to a leopard, a natural predator the cheetah’s new habitat shares. Viewed from New Delhi, the incident underscores the brutal arithmetic of reintroduction: a project that had celebrated a rare birth now confronts the reality that even closely monitored animals remain vulnerable to the existing food chain.

Yet at the other end of the spectrum of human intervention lies Lola ya Bonobo, the world’s only sanctuary for orphaned bonobos on the outskirts of Kinshasa. Here, foster mothers like Micheline Nzonji, who has spent 24 years in the role, bottle-feed and coddle infants whose mothers were killed by poachers. “Without me, without us, these bonobos cannot survive,” she says. The sanctuary provides a carefully controlled affection that allows the primates to later be released into a protected reserve, a model that contrasts sharply with the hands-off approach that left India’s cubs exposed. Analysts in Kinshasa note that the bonobo programme succeeds precisely because it replaces the missing maternal bond with human warmth, an option that conservationists in Kuno deliberately avoided.

A parallel drama is unfolding in California, where two orphaned black bear cubs are being coaxed back to the wild after state officials euthanised their mother, “Blondie”, in March. Weighing barely six pounds when rescued, the brothers required spoon-feedings four times a day and strict avoidance of human familiarity. Now, at four months old, they have moved into an outdoor habitat at San Diego Humane Society’s Ramona Wildlife Center and begun feeding independently. The cubs’ rehabilitation is a delicate balancing act: humans must provide care without imprinting, a challenge that every sanctuary faces in different forms.

Further east, in India’s Meghalaya state, a natural phenomenon has drawn crowds rather than conservation teams. The rare cicada Chremistica ribhoi has emerged from underground for the first time in four years, an event locals call the “World Cup beetle” because it coincides with football tournaments. Villagers hunt the insects by torchlight, then cook and sell them at markets. The cicada’s periodic emergence is a reminder that not every wildlife encounter demands human rescue; the rhythm of birth, predation and consumption is the baseline against which all intervention must be judged. As field ecologists in Kuno reassess predator-prey dynamics and sanctuaries in Congo and California continue their painstaking work, the question remains whether the best conservation strategy is to let nature take its course or to reshape it, one orphan at a time.