Old video of a leopard carrying a monkey and its baby in its jaws is being linked to the recently brought cheetahs to India - FACTLY
Sai Krishna Muthyanolla
September 23, 2022
A post with a video is being shared widely on social media. The video shows a big cat carrying a monkey in its jaws while the monkey’s baby clings to its parent. The post description in Hindi translates to ‘Today, the same old history is being repeated again. Foreigners are being called to kill loved ones.’ Recently, India has imported Cheetahs from Namibia to reintroduce them to our country after the species was declared extinct in 1952. The viral post is shared in this context. We also found two other posts (here and here) with the same video, which are also being shared in the same context. Let’s fact-check this video through this post.
Claim: Big cat in the video, which is carrying a monkey in its jaws, is one of the cheetahs that was brought to India from Namibia.
Fact: This is an old video which was shot by a wildlife photographer named Igor Altuna in Zambia. The big cat is a leopard, not a cheetah. Hence the claim made in the post is MISLEADING.
We ran a keyword search on the internet and found a news article in ‘Daily Mail’ which contains photos of a big cat carrying a monkey in its mouth. Reportedly, these photographs of a Leopard carrying a monkey in its jaws were captured by a wildlife photographer named Shafeeq Mulla from Chipata, Zambia.
To learn about the video which is in the viral post, we looked on the internet for  ‘IGORALTUNA’, which is the watermark of the video and were led to an Instagram account, igor_altun. It belongs to a wildlife photographer named Igor Altuna. The original video, which is 5 seconds longer (31 Seconds) than the video from the viral post, is available on his Instagram (uploaded in 2021) and website.
With this evidence, it can be concluded that an old video of a leopard carrying its prey is being falsely shared as the cheetahs that were brought to India recently. As per a news report published in ‘The New Indian Express,’ the cheetahs which were released into Kuno Nation Park on 17 September 2022 will be quarantined for a month. They will be released into the wild by the end of this year
To sum it up, an old video of a leopard carrying a monkey and its baby in its jaws is being linked to the recently brought cheetah to India.