HEART OF THE JAGUAR

On the struggle to protect the Americas’ largest cat.

As author Campbell notes throughout, the fortunes of the “New World’s most dominant apex predator” would be considerably diminished absent the work of the late biologist Alan Rabinowitz. George Schaller, the eminent zoologist and world traveler, sent Rabinowitz to Central America to track the disappearing cat, its habitat being constantly eroded by human development. Rabinowitz returned with the conviction that contiguous corridors, safe ground constituting “a single ecological unit,” was needed to give the jaguar room to roam. He also courted controversy when a few individual jaguars were spotted in Arizona and New Mexico, arguing that conservation efforts needed to be concentrated south of the border. Yet, as Campbell observes, the cat, whose ancestors crossed the Bering land bridge from Siberia a million years ago, has a historic range that includes much of the western U.S. as well as Mexico and points south. While the Southwestern deserts may be a future sanctuary for the big cat, jaguars thrive best in more tropical settings, as Campbell reports from prey-rich regions such as the Amazonian rainforest and the Pantanal and Iberá wetlands of South America. In fact, the deserts are now the setting for extensive legal struggles to declare the jaguar a native and endangered species—a designation most ranchers oppose, having already lost the battle against reintroducing the Mexican gray wolf. As Campbell adds, the struggle to preserve jaguar habitat sometimes overlaps with the struggle to preserve Indigenous homelands, as with the Maya people of the Yucatán, their historic territory threatened by tourism and the construction of a high-speed train. At the same time, the Trump border wall is preventing the migration of jaguars north from Mexico, yet another obstacle to the conservation of the species.

A good overview of the complexities behind keeping a threatened species alive in a world overrun by humans.