Re-Wilding The Jaguar In the USA: The Impossible Dream?
Corazón, a beautiful female jaguar, has been poisoned to death and her cub, as a consequence, starved to death. They lived on a reserve in Sonora, north-western Mexico, just below Arizona in the USA.
Corazón had wandered to a place about 12 miles north of the reserve into what is a buffer zone between the reserve and human settlements and in certain parts of the buffer zone people have agreed to protect the jaguar should he or she wander from the reserve but in this instance Corazón wandered into a ranch that was not a signatory to protecting the jaguar. She was poisoned.
The jaguar is fully protected by law in Mexico and accordingly the person who poisoned this beautiful animal is a criminal but unfortunately he has not been caught. That does not surprise me because how do you prove it? There will be no witnesses. Corazón’s body was burned presumably to try and hide evidence.
There we have it, the impossible dream to try and preserve the jaguar in Mexico but another objective of the Northern Jaguar Project, who managed the reserve in partnership with Naturalia, is to try and re-wild the Jaguar in the USA: to bring the Jaguar back to the United States of America where it once roamed until it was persecuted out of existence.
How do you prevent people from killing the Jaguar? This is the third largest cat in the world and the wild cat species with the strongest bite (200 psi compared to tiger at 1000 psi and lion at 600 psi). Farmers and ranchers instinctively protect their livestock and have little natural inclination to protect endangered species. It’s all about commerce, making money and surviving. The human, too, has to survive and it is probably quite difficult to do that on a ranch in northern Mexico.
Effective wild species conservation is all about obtaining an agreement from a wide range of local people to participate in their conservation, which in this case is the endangered jaguar. I would go further and state that it is impossible to run an effective wildcat species conservation program without the full participation of a wide range of local residents, particularly farmers.
There is always a clash between wild cats and farmers because farmers have encroached upon the habitat and range of the wild cats and therefore they share the same area which means that a farmer’s livestock is living on the land of the jaguar in Northern Mexico. How impractical is that?
Wild cat reserves are often too small to accommodate the enormous ranges that wild cats require, especially the large species. A single male jaguar has a personal range of up to 100 square kilometers. Impressively, the Northern Jaguar Project (NJP) reserve is 50,000 acres. 100 square kms is about 25,000 acres. However, the reserve is, therefore, technically only able to contain a few cats, not enough for effective procreation because of inbreeding.
Despite the admirable attempt of the NJP to build a reserve out of two ranches, it is all but impossible to keep a large wild cat species within the reserve and what happens when it wanders away and bumps into humans?
Corazón was a famous jaguar in this reserve. She was well known and she had several litters of cubs. She was a treasure and an important cat. Her death was discovered because she wore a radio transmitting collar which fell silent indicating her death.
I have written about another attempt to re-wild the Jaguar into the USA in building a reserve within southern Arizona and New Mexico (on the border of Mexico). I am not sure how that project is progressing but there is certainly a body of people in America who are keen to reintroduce the Jaguar into the country other than in a cage. As I understand it another objective of NJP is to join these two reserves with a corridor. I wish them the best of luck but as far as I’m concerned it is the impossible dream. Sorry to be pessimistic.
Sources:
- Firstly my thanks to Dan for showing me this story
- Secondly my thanks to the NJP website.