jaguar

media type="custom" key="4066721" align="right"Jaguars
related: wildlife, cats linkedin: [|Richard Mahler]

Role Among Indigenous Peoples
Aztec warriors donned the creature's dappled pelt as a protective cloak during battle. The Maya depended on the animals to guard Xibalba, the sacred underworld. Arizona's Hopi tracked them in ceremonial hunts as late as 1908. Indigenous groups from California's deserts to Argentina's pampas honored these alpha predators in art, adornment, and ritual. Today the very name bestows status on footballs teams and a luxury automobile, among other enterprises.

The jaguar — variously referred to as el tigre, onça, and black panther — may be the most widely revered carnivore endemic to the Americas, yet scientists have only a basic understanding of the charismatic cat, our hemisphere's biggest. Like its closest relatives, the leopards of Asia and Africa, the jaguar is vanishing before it is fully known. What's clear, however, is the feline's mesmerizing effect on humans.

From the Agua Caliente of the Mojave to the Guaraní along the Río de la Plata, indigenous cultures have been awestruck by this unrivaled hunter for millennia. The jaguar embodied god-like powers for the ancient Olmec, Maya, Aztec, Inca, and other civilizations. Tribal people in the southwestern United States and Latin America continue to perform jaguar dances that evoke its symbolic power and cunning. In Amazonia's rainforests, where the cats continue to thrive, a rich legacy of jaguar-related traditions still exists.

Despite such high honor and distinguished patronage, this highly secretive animal is unnecessarily feared and widely misunderstood. Many assume, for instance, that all jaguars are black. (Only about six percent are; typical coloration is a reddish buff, adorned with inky dots and rosettes.) A jaguar is not a panther. (The term refers to its cousin, otherwise known as mountain lion, cougar, or puma.) Unlike panthers, jaguars almost never kill people. (Only a handful of attacks on humans are documented, most involving zoo animals.) Surprising to many, jaguars are U.S. natives whose history entwines with many North American tribes and who, like our indigenous people, were decimated by extermination policies that extended well into the 20th century.

As recently as the 1800s, jaguars roamed the Southwest freely from California to Louisiana, far north of the jungles where they have always been more common. In Arizona and New Mexico, where at least four individual jaguars have been photographed since 1996, images of the cat occur in murals and rock art left by the Pueblo and Mogollon cultures. Along New Mexico's Río Puerco, the Pottery Mound site contains a spectacular painting of a jaguar while a similar animal is rendered in a smoke-blackened cave near Los Alamos.

Kiva paintings found in Arizona’s Hopi villages depict cat-like creatures believed to be jaguars. Anthropologist Leslie White theorizes that a supposedly mythical beast in Pueblo religion, the rohona, is really a jaguar. At Santa Ana Pueblo, north of Albuquerque, White was told that a rohana image found there was a "big cat with spots" representing one of the "spirit hunters" who, in turn, bestowed power on Santa Ana's human hunters. A similar tradition exists at nearby Zia Pueblo.

Further north, colonial records confirm the Diné (Navajo) spoke to Spanish missionaries variously of a "meadow wildcat," "tiger," and "spotted lion," all believed to refer to the jaguar. The same felid may be among the "Cat People" referred to in Diné creation stories and the "Spotted Lion" of sand paintings. At least three ceremonies practiced by Diné healers refer to spotted cats and their skins.

During the 1860s, hundreds of Diné and Apache were incarcerated by the U.S. military at Bosque Redondo, where officer John Cremony wrote that on his hunts sightings of "jaguars were by no means uncommon." In a separate report, an Apache who attacked a man with unusual ferocity claimed: "I made jaguar medicine on him and grabbed him like a jaguar and killed him. I was like a jaguar."

The Apache, Hopi, and Akimel O'Odham are among Southwest people known to have prized jaguar skin for making quivers, presumably to convey some of the cat’s skills to the arrows they carried. Jaguar bones, teeth, talons, and pelts were valued far and wide as ceremonial items and trade goods. Near El Paso, Texas, rock art depicting Panthera onca — as scientists call the jaguar — is found in two natural shelters known as Jaguar Cave and the Cave of the Masks. These faded drawings are attributed to the Mogollon culture and suggest Mesoamerican influence. The Cave of the Masks animal wears a "shaman’s cap" that may reflect the cat’s pivotal role among peoples to the south.

Several indigenous groups continue to hold jaguars sacred in Mexico, where the cat persists in isolated mountains, forests, and wetlands. The Raramuri (Tarahumara) and Huasteca, tribes of the northern Sierra Madre, regularly honor the cat in their ceremonies and shamanic traditions. The highly spiritual Huichol of Nayarit and Jalisco still make elaborate bead-yarn-and-beeswax jaguar masks and figures as totems associated with rain and masculine power.

In central Mexico, folk traditions mingle with both modern Catholicism and rites performed by the Aztec centuries ago. In Suchiapa, for example, the annual Corpus Cristi festival includes dozens of teenage boys wearing jaguar masks. Their job is to lead a long procession and secure intersections so the parade will move smoothly. The shouts of these "wannabe" jaguars — demonstrating assertive power as their warrior ancestors hight have some 500 years ago — are heard blocks away.

Sacred to the Shaman

In the tropical forests of South America, jaguars continue to play starring roles in the real-life dramas of tribal people, particularly through shamans, curanderos (and curanderas), or doctors of natural medicine. Although each practitioner's repertoire varies, such specialists generally believe they possess supernatural powers to heal or cause sickness, summon and communicate with spirits, see visions, shift perceptions of reality, and transform themselves into such praiseworthy animals as jaguars. When a shaman, for example, consumes a psychotropic drug, paints his face with spots or rosettes, and bejewels himself (or herself) with the teeth, claws, and skin of a jaguar, that shaman believes he or she shares in the cat's ability to rule the rainforest, expand physical senses, and explore all dimensions of consciousness.

In this context the jaguar is considered not merely a totem or companion animal, but as a portal to another realm. Some shamans, adorned with the claws and teeth of the sacred cat, go so far as to store their most important compounds in hollowed jaguar bones or within medicine bags crafted of jaguar leather.

Remote lowland tropical basins are where the jaguar is most closely associated with tribal ceremonies and origin stories. Members of the Tukano tribe, for instance, believe the sun itself created the spotted cat to be his representative on Earth. They believe our neighborhood star gave jaguar the yellow color of solar power and the growl of thunder, said to be the voice of the sun.

Examples of jaguar emulation abound throughout Amazonia. Members of the Matsés tribe of the Río Gálvez rainforest, for example, surprised their European "discoverers" in 1976 with decorations they wore in order to resemble and pay homage to the jaguar. These included thin bones piercing the flares of their noses and meant to resemble cat whiskers, shell earrings said to look like jaguar ears, sticks puncturing lips to evoke long canine teeth, and tattoos or dyes that suggest the cat's rosettes and mouth. Sometimes called "the cat people," the Matsése are masters of 12-foot-long blowguns; the poison for their darts occasionally mixed with jaguar hairs for extra potency.

Perhaps the greatest fascination with the jaguar was demonstrated by the Classic Maya of Mesoamerica, who believed the cats served as intermediaries between the living and the dead and also protected the homes of Maya rulers. In short, they were close allies in a sacred universe. The priest-kings who ran society wrapped themselves in the cat's skin as they sat on elevated pedestals, feet tucked into jaguar-leather moccasins. Stone thrones were sometimes shaped like jaguars, then covered with jaguar pelts in a show of respect to gods, spirits, and rulers. One of the finest gifts anyone could bestow upon a shaman or a king was a jaguar cub, which could be kept to adulthood, offered as a blood sacrifice, and "harvested" for its pelt and other valuable body parts.

Over centuries, the Classic Maya wove jaguars into a worshipful tapestry of art, religion, and legend. The animal is thought to have embodied several important deities, including those variously overseeing the sun, night, rain, and Xibalba — the surreal underworld where only the most holy and powerful men (and an occasional woman) could enjoy infinite afterlife. This same god ruled the night's "sun-less sky." The ebony, gold, and cream-colored marks on a jaguar’s fur symbolized the splash of stars across the heavens and simultaneously allowed the cat to blend into the shadows of trees. In the jungle night, the feline's wide, perceptive eyes were said to gleam like the moon.

A traditional Maya belief is that the Jaguar God (as a ruler of darkness) is transformed into the fire-eyed Sun God (a ruler of light) precisely at dawn each morning, traveling across the sky before again becoming the Jaguar God at dusk. Without this creature's help, the sun might never return. In this metaphoric way, both the supernatural jaguar and the regal priest-king was said to defy the permanent death that afflicts less-exalted beings. The notion was that some kind of living god was essential in order to take the sun safely through the forbidding night and draw it consistently beneath the Earth from west to east. What better emissary than a jaguar?

The Maya — like the Olmec and Inca before them and the Aztec and Toltec who followed —revered jaguars even as they hunted and sacrificed them. Indeed, few beings have engaged the human heart and soul as consistently and as deeply as have these magnificent felines. The jaguar has long dominated the religions and cultures, myths and legends, of nearly our entire hemisphere, from the Southwest deserts to Argentina's pampas. It has symbolized gods and nature, virility and power, royalty and magic, healing and destruction. Given this enduring bond, a world without Panthera onca is hard to imagine.

Current Status

Until aggressive hunting jaguars for sport and fur decimated their numbers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, jaguars were fairly common and widespread in tropical regions of the New World. They also thrived in ecosystems as varied as desert mountains, pine forests, swamps, and grasslands. Remarkably, the cats adapted to high-altitude spruce and fir as well as lowland cacti and thornscrub. Yet jaguars are so shy and secretive, roaming mainly in night or twilight hours, that researchers can only guess how many remain in the wild. The "all black" (melanistic) jaguar, which accounts for about six percent of all specimens, is even harder to see.

Experts estimate between 8,000 and 16,000 wild jaguars are left, occurring in less than two-thirds of their original territory over a broad but fragmented swath from southern Arizona and New Mexico to northern Argentina. Less than 500 are held by zoos worldwide; very few are kept as pets or circus performers.

An endangered species, jaguar numbers appear to be in steady decline, though they may be holding their own in the densest jungles of Amazonia. Habitat destruction, forest disintegration, prey loss, and poaching are the main threats to survival of this animal, which requires vast tracts of undeveloped land and plenty of wild game. An opportunistic hunter, the jaguar's diet includes almost anything that moves, with a preference for deer, peccaries, capybaras, coati, armadillo, snakes, birds, and small mammals. Where available, the cat will happily consume turtles and fish as well as domestic pets and any kind of livestock.

Under the 1975 international CITES agreement, all trade in non-vintage jaguar products is banned, putting an end to the wholesale slaughter of these and other exotic cats for the manufacture of fancy rugs and women's luxury clothing. A thriving black market for pelts still exists, however, and wildlife protection laws are largely unenforced south of the U.S. border. Only a few countries allow any form of legal jaguar hunting. Enlightened conservation and environmental education programs are making headway in several nations, notably Mexico, Belize, Costa Rica, Bolivia, and Brazil. Nevertheless, top wildlife biologists believe time is of the essence in saving the wild jaguar. They are working simultaneously to curb indiscriminate poaching, preserve key habitat, and to establish travel routes between protected areas. The latter is thought necessary to protect the genetic strength and diversity of Panthera onca, inasmuch as the species occurs in low densities even under ideal conditions.

The jaguar population within Brazil is thought to remain substantial, while for several other nations it may be painfully low. Fewer than 300 jaguars are said to persist in Argentina, South America's second-largest country. In the former wildlife stronghold of Guatemala, one well-informed resident scientist told me, "There may be 40 jaguars, there may be 400; no one knows." The total for all of Mexico — once a bastion for Panthera onca in many rural areas from Sonora to Chiapas — could be far fewer than the 2,000 cats projected in 2007 by one prominent (and optimistic) Mexican ecologist. Jaguars would likely be in worse trouble were it not for the effective predatory strategies they have honed over millennia. A meat-eating animal this large requires many calories simply to survive and thus must calculate carefully how much energy will be spent tracking and killing prey. Using its great skill and sharp senses, the cat relies heavily on the ambush technique. Deer, peccaries, and tapirs are sensible choices inasmuch as the meat of a single animal can sustain a jaguar for days.

The cats tend to develop specific hunting circuits, frequently following existing trails — or backcountry roads, if available — with all sensory input attuned to the surroundings. While searching for a meal, a jaguar's eyes are wide open, aware of any movement. Hair-trigger hearing is attentive to the slightest unexpected noise. The cat's sense of smell is tuned to tiny nuances of odor in soil, foliage, or air. If it finds no opportunities on its usual rounds, a jaguar may hide in thick brush and position itself to carry out a surprise attack, crushing a victim'sskull with its powerful jaws. Ideally, it will be on the lookout for an isolated individual, a sub-adult, or in the case of a herd animal, a straggler left behind by disease, old age, or injury. Because a jaguar is not particularly fast or graceful on its feet, staying hidden and quiet is essential.

"In sum," concluded New York Times science reporter Natalie Angier in a 2003 report, "the jaguar has evolved a two-pronged approach to fetching dinner — stay virtually invisible to the last possible moment and then deliver an overwhelming blow."

A jaguar has few natural enemies outside its own kind and will even sleep soundly in the open. But there are limits to its complacency. If a male encounters a fellow jaguar, particularly another male, it may attack in order to acquire or defend a territory. The cat is generally reluctant to pick such fights, since even small injuries in the tropics can quickly become infected, leading to a slow, agonizing death. The loss of a tooth or eye also may portend an early demise. A handful of jungle animals — including the white-lipped peccary, crocodile, giant anteater, and anaconda — are known to be physically aggressive toward jaguars and occasionally succeed in killing them. But this cat is not a man-eater; there are virtually no documented accounts of wild jaguars making unprovoked attacks on humans. Once in a great while, one fatally mauls an inattentive zookeeper or provocative hunter. It is impossible to guarantee anyone a glimpse of a wild jaguar, though there are a few places in Central and South America where the odds are slightly better.

For determined ecotourists, the best potential sighting locales include Belize's [|Cockscomb Basin Wildlife Sanctuary], [|Chan Chich Lodge] (also in Belize), Mexico's [|Calakmul Biosphere Reserve], Costa Rica's [|Corcovado National Park] and various ecotourism resorts in Brazil's Pantanal region.

Unanswered Questions
Jaguars are famous for their independence and elusiveness. Even experts who study them may go months, even years, without glimpsing Panthera onca in the wild. "Tracking the stealthy, solitary animals," understated Eduardo Carrillo, a Costa Rican biologist, in a recent Natural History magazine article "remains exceedingly difficult." Like some small African cats, including the caracal and serval, field researchers study jaguars mostly through indirect evidence rather than direct observation. Remotely-activated cameras, feces collection, hair snares, and track examination substitute for first-hand looks.

One result is that while there is plenty of general knowledge about the jaguar as a species, significant details — of varying scientific importance — are missing. It is reported, for example, that no one has ever filmed or videotaped au naturel a wild female with her cubs. This fundamental relationship, in which a youngster is taught exactly how to be a jaguar, remains rather mysterious. Also unclear is how jaguars, often solitary throughout adulthood, actually find and court their mates. Other questions linger: Why are jaguars, as compared to most other large cats, such mediocre runners and superb swimmers? Why does each jaguar have a pattern of spots and rosettes that's as unique as a fingerprint? Why is this pattern different on left and right flanks? How many jaguars move between North and South America across the Darién Gap, and how important is such migration in keeping gene pools healthy? When adult males head out to far-flung places — like the mountains of Arizona and New Mexico — how do they get there without being detected? What are they looking for — or fleeing from?

One reason for protecting jaguars is simply to learn more about them. Like other fauna, intelligence concerning such highly evolved and specialized creatures — jaguars have been around for any hundreds of thousands of years — may illuminate our own lives. But such inquiry is not easy, inasmuch as big cats tend to live in obscure places and generally are most active at night.

Strategies for protecting Panthera onca vary from place to place, but a key component increasingly includes participation by local residents, who may live among jaguars for their entire lives. Conservationists are sensitive to criticism that they prefer animals to humans and many biologists try to reach a workable consensus with all interested parties. In Mexico's Sierra Madre Occidental, for instance, researchers are providing new sources of income for ranchers who lose an occasional calf to jaguars. Members of the community are paid directly for photographs of such cats and cattleman are compensated for depredation losses. In return for allowing jaguars and scientists to roam their properties, some landowners now welcome U.S. deer hunters and ecotourists to their ranches.

In southern Mexico as well as neighboring Guatemala and Belize, subsistence farmers who compete with jaguars for wild game (and who sometimes lose their pigs, chickens, and dogs to the cats) are also paid compensation. A few programs employ residents near jaguar strongholds as tour guides, artisans, vendors, lodge operators, restaurateurs, park wardens, and assistants to scientists. In areas surrounded the Calakmul and Si'an Ka'an biospheres in Mexico, those who previous hunted in the preserves are now shown how to grow more sustainable crops, wild-harvest commercially valuable plants, and adopt husbandry practices that lessens the chances they will lose livestock to predators.

One of the most innovative conservation schemes is in the Pantanal region of southern Brazil and adjacent portions of Bolivia and Paraguay. Here is one of the densest concentrations of jaguars on Earth — upwards of 2,000 by most estimates —and an equally strong nucleus of ranchers whose traditions dictate: "The only good jaguar is a dead one." This include those fitted by scientists with radio-collars.

"We have to act," Sandra Cavalcanti, a Brazilian biologist who studies Pantanal jaguars, told the New York Times in a 2008 article. Strategies advocated by Cavailcanti and her colleagues include instruction of residents in non-lethal forms of predator control and better livestock management, along with payments for jaguar-killed cattle and financial incentives for leaving the cats alone. Some ranches in Brazil have cut depredation dramatically by stringing electric fences, deploying guard dogs, installing bright lights around pastures, instituting regular patrols, and even setting off fireworks at night. Concurrently, international groups such as the London-based Panthera Foundation have bought large ranches and transformed them into jaguar sanctuaries while a handful of other ranchers are protecting cats as part of sideline ecotourism businesses. Other innovative programs are bringing much-need services to the Pantanal, such as free or low-cost medical care, in return for an end to poaching. All this may help, but some scientists are thinking even bigger.

"The broad vision is a [contiguous] jaguar corridorfrom Mexico to Argentina," says Alan Rabinowitz, director of science and exploration at the Wildlife Conservation Society. The biologist quotes research suggesting at least some of the cats move unobtrusively through human-disturbed landscapes, including plantations and ranches, en route to the less inhabited areas where they prefer to mate and hunt.

"The paradigm for conservation at the time [Belize's Cockscomb jaguar sanctuary was created] was to find good areas of habitat and lock them up," said Rabinowitz. "We will not save jaguars [this way] in the long term. We will lose everything that makes them truly wild. To save them forever we need to save not just postage-stamp core areas but inviolate corridors and larger landscapes that are connected."

Rabinowitz proposes that governments take steps to protect known corridors and either pay or give tax credits to property owners in return for use of their land by Panthera onca. "I think this is going to be the toughest thing I've ever attempted," he concludes, "but the most meaningful in many ways and a model [for conservation] unlike any other."

Without the capacity to remain genetically diverse, the man the New York Times once dubbed "the Indiana Jones of wildlife science" fears jaguars in isolated pockets may become too inbred. Such a fate threatens other shrinking large-cat populations, notably the critically endangered Florida panther, which struggles to hang on after dwindling to less than 30 individuals during the 1980s. Similarly, only 50 to 60 Asiatic cheetahs are said to remain. Groups this small are vulnerable to poaching, disease, prey loss, and such catastrophic events as droughts, hurricanes, and wildfires. Pregnancies are more difficult and birth defects more likely.

Some biologists believe jaguars have been exchanging their genetic material over a wide geography for millennia, allowing them to remain essentially the same species. Many believe this makes today's tasks of habitat protection and environmental education more urgent than ever.

Border Fence Threat
They are life-long ranchers who — because they must coexist with Border Patrol officials and undocumented immigrants — agreed to speak with me only if not identified. They own or lease grazing lands along the U.S.-Mexico border in Arizona's southeast corner and New Mexico's "bootheel". Polite and friendly in the Old West tradition, these desert-dwellers use uncharacteristically strong language to denounce ongoing government installation of what one resident labels a "big monster metal fence" along remote sections of frontier.

In e-mail messages and phone calls to family, friends, and neighbors, complaints are mounting over four types of new border constructions: access roads, "Normandy invasion"-style vehicle barricades, barbed-wire fences, and metal barriers up to 18 feet high. While such work has been done throughout the Bush Administration and even earlier, it has escalated dramatically since mid-2007.

Officials at the agency in charge of the project, the Department of Homeland Security, insist such barriers have proven to be effective deterrents, notably in Southern California. Many U.S. citizens concerned about the unauthorized arrival of people and narcotics from Latin America seem to agree, arguing such measures are long overdue.

Rapid fence construction is being driven in part by President Bush's Republican base, which is inflamed about illegal immigration and has pushed 2008 presidential candidates to focus more on immigration. In order to expedite the process, the Real ID Act of 2005 allows Homeland Security to waive environmental and occupational safety laws that might otherwise impede its building projects.

But there's more at stake here than political gamesmanship and anti-terrorism strategies. Federally-mandated construction may pose a major threat to creatures whose kind have moved freely across the border for millennia.

"This region," Cochise County rancher Warner Glenn points out, "is the northern limit for many neotropical species that would be negatively affected by opening the country to vehicle traffic. [A high] fence will not deter any traffic except animals."

Glenn, 71, believes the largest barriers will have a particularly negative impact on the jaguar. Relatively common in southern Arizona and New Mexico in the early nineteenth century, the big cats were almost wiped out by early settlers and only a handful have been seen north of the border since 1950. Glenn, a mountain lion hunter, was lucky enough to photograph two such jaguars: during 1996 in Arizona's Peloncillo range and in 2006 in the Animas Mountains of New Mexico.

"They are beautiful creatures," Glenn said. "One thing is for sure, it will take all of our efforts to protect this [species] and the wide open country it needs."

About 100 miles west of the Glenn Ranch, near Nogales, researchers and life-long trackers Jack Childs and Emil McCain of the Borderlands Jaguar Detection Project contend that increased security at lower altitudes already has pushed "huge numbers" of illegal border-crossers into the mountains. McCain, a biologist specializing in cats, has seen one ecologically rich valley "become a major drug highway." According to McCain, "signs of wildlife, other than birds, were nonexistent [during an August 2007 visit]. All jaguar monitoring cameras in the area have been demolished. In view of this kind of human traffic and waste, I don't think any wildlife will be using the canyon."

McCain, based near Nogales, says the Border Patrol has placed Normandy-style barricades within his study zone, including at one of three points where an oft-photographed jaguar is known to cross into Mexico. An employee advised the biologist that "those vehicle barriers [soon] will be replaced with solid walls." McCain believes such blockades may undermine all study of wild U.S. jaguars, jeopardizing thousands of hours of fieldwork he has carried out with Childs and others. Their efforts were prompted by a 1996 incident in which a party led by Childs treed a jaguar in the Baboquivari Mountains southwest of Tucson. This cat, a healthy male, continues to roam Arizona's desert ranges.

"As I see it," says Childs, a retired land surveyor based in Amado, "all forms of border enforcement — whether solid barriers or virtual fencing in the form of motion cameras and detectors — have a negative impact on wildlife. I favor the virtual fence over the solid wall, except in cities and towns." According to Childs, whose son works for the Border Patrol, a more enduring solution to the problem of illegal entry is to "make it easier [for immigrants] to obtain a work permit and to issue identification cards with photos and fingerprints."

McCain, who has spent years exploring the borderlands, notes that surveillance in remote areas is difficult and dangerous for Patrol officers as well as unauthorized entrants, scores of whom die of exposure each year in the desert. What's more, he says, "the mountains along the border are biologically very diverse and unique: home to many species of mammals, birds, reptiles, fish, and insects found nowhere else in North America. Funneling tens of thousands of border-crossers through these areas will destroy these ecosystems."

The importance of access must not be underestimated, believes McCain, who also has conducted jaguar research in northern Mexico and Central America. "In Sonora, jaguars are seriously threatened by loss of habitat, reduced prey populations, and direct hunting. In contrast, jaguars in the U.S. occupy largely protected public lands where native prey are managed at healthy numbers, hunting laws are enforced, and a livestock compensation program mitigates the economic concerns of local ranchers."

As McCain sees it, "Arizona and New Mexico may serve as important refuges, providing a 'reverse source' to the greater population. However, with no known breeding north of the border in 60 years, U.S. jaguars are dependent on reproduction in Mexico. Without this cohesive habitat and gene flow ... the jaguar will not persist north of the border."

In recent months Border Patrol officials have handed out pamphlets containing a picture of the World Trade Center burning after the September 11 attacks. Each displays the phrase "Never Forget" and urges residents to support the government's plan to build high fences in order "to bring effective control to our nation's borders." While this literature circulates, the agency insists it will consider "environmental, cultural, and historical aspects" of land that may be affected by barriers. But in mid-January 2008, the Fish & Wildlife Service, the agency charged with enforcing the Endangered Species Act, confirmed that it would make no effort to intervene on behalf of the jaguar in the construction of border barriers, arguing that the U.S. portion of the cat's habitat was not essential to its survival. For the first time ever, federal authorities had deliberately abandoned its efforts to protect an endangered animal, as required by law.

Jaguar Resources
When searching for Internet sites about the jaguar, be aware that most focus on the car, not the cat. (The word "jaguar" is also often associated with sports teams, company names, musical groups, and computer stuff.) You can fine-tune your search by including keywords such as "animal" and "cat," but may have to slog through a lot of other links anyway.

Some of the best sites I have found include: [|http://www.savethejaguar.com] (maintained by New York-based the Wildlife Conservation Society, perhaps the world leader in jaguar research and conservation), [|http://www.borderjag.com] (from the Borderlands Jaguar Detection Project, a group dedicated to studying jaguars along the southern borders of Arizona and New Mexico), [|http://www.biologicaldiversity.org] (the Center for Biological Diversity is involved in litigation that attempts to establish more protections for U.S. jaguars), [|http://jaguarsp.org] (details the Jaguar Species Survival Plan of the American Zoo & Aquarium Assn.), [|http://www.jaguares.com.ar] (discusses conservation in northern Argentina, at the southern extremity of the cat's range), and [|http://www.northernjaguarproject.org] (a bi-national venture that has established the first jaguar sanctuary in northern Mexico). Check my own website, [|thejaguarsshadow.com], for material related to my forthcoming book, The Jaguar's Shadow: Searching for a Mythic Cat.

Among books written on the subject, one of the best is scientist Alan Rabinowitz's fine (but 22-year-old) eco-memoir is Jaguar: One Man's Struggle to Establish the World's First Jaguar Sanctuary (new edition published by Island Press, 2000). Biologists Carlos López-González and David E. Brown cover the history of border-area jaguars in their well-illustrated 2001 volume, Borderland Jaguars (University of Utah Press). Perhaps the best overview of all felids is Wild Cats of the World, by husband-and-wife Mel and Fiona Sunquist, a biologist and science writer, respectively (University of Chicago Press, 2002). For the true aficionado or wildlife scientist, the Wildlife Conservation Society helped publish Jaguars in the New Millennium, a collection of journal articles and research papers coming out of a 1998 conference of the same name held in Morelos, México, under the auspices of WCS and the University of Mexico. It's out of print but conceivably available from WCS.

Worthy videos (available via Netflix) include In Search of the Jaguar, a one-hour National Geographic TV documentary ( www.nationalgeographic.com/tv/specials/jaguar ) and Jaguar: Year of the Cat, an hour-long PBS-TV documentary ( www.pbs.com ). YouTube also occasionally has jaguar-related segments, usually excerpted from existing documentaries by the likes of BBC or the Discovery Networks (Animal Planet).

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Richard Mahler has written for Native Artist, Native Peoples, Arizona Highways, New Mexico Magazine, Southwest Art, and scores of other publications. Among his twelves books is the ecotourism guides to Belize and Guatemala. This feature is adapted from The Jaguar's Shadow: Searching for a Mythic Cat, to be published in 2008 by Yale University Press. Richard lives in Silver City, New Mexico, where jaguars once roamed. His website is [|www.RichardMahler.com] media type="custom" key="5095393"

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Related Book:
- Kudos to author Lane Simonian for producing the definitive English-language account of Mexican environmental history. This book traces the history of conservation and environmentalism in Mexico from the pre-Conquest era to roughly 1992 and the NAFTA debates. Available in Spanish from the National Institutute of Ecology -- [|La Defensa de la Tierra del Jaguar] [|Planeta Review]
 * [|Defending the Land of the Jaguar: Natural History of Mexico]**, University of Texas Press, 1995, by Lane Simonian

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