Jaguar: An Indomitable Beast – Podcast Transcript

ALAN RABINOWITZ (ZOOLOGIST AND CEO OF PANTHERA CORPORATION): I’ve been working on cats for more than 30 years. And nothing, nothing in my wanderings, nothing in the circumstances when I have faced tigers and lions when they openly growled at me or confronted me or I met them on a trail when I didn’t think I’d be meeting them on a trail—nothing quite compares to the hair-raising fear and just amazement I would feel, and I had to feel several times, walking in the rainforest of central and South America and listening to this sound.

[RECORDING OF JAGUAR GROWLING]

I couldn’t see where the jaguar was. He wouldn’t show himself. This is one of many vocalizations of the jaguar, just telling me to stay the hell away. Just telling me to move on.

There is nothing quite so humbling as knowing that there is a danger that you cannot escape from if the thing that’s producing that danger just wants to end it all for you. But that’s not the kind of animal jaguars are. And as much fear as that sound always instills in me, it also warms my heart. Although, I could do without hearing it while I’m walking in the jungle.

Now, in the 4.6 billion years that the Earth has been around, cats—cats as a group—are a relatively recent inhabitant. The first felid-like carnivores came about on the surface of the Earth about 25 to 30 million years ago. Believe it or not, however, after that, there’s something called the “cat gap.” There’s so little fossils, so few fossils found on prehistoric cats that we really don’t know much about the evolutionary histories of many of the different kinds of cats.

When people would find cat evidence, prehistoric evidence, it would usually be—this is really excellent—it would usually be in the form of a single tooth. Part of a cranium. Part of a jaw. Or a bone fragment. Most of what we speculate about when the cats have evolved, when they diverged into all the different groups that they now exist actually comes from molecular phylogenies. In other words, looking at living cats’ DNA sequences and kind of backtracking that to forming evolutionary trees and relationships.

But the fossil record does exist. Now, cats, one of the earliest divergence of the early cats was the big cats, was the pantherine line, panthera. But we have no real idea of when that truly happened. All the cats have a generally similar anatomical structure, but among the large cats, morphologically and, somewhat anatomically, they’re extremely robust. Huge. Not as huge as they were at one time, but they still exist as some of the world’s largest terrestrial mammals.

Now, until recently, the oldest fossil of a cat was from Tanzania. Putting it back about 3.8 to 4 million years ago, leading some people to believe that the big cats originated, that the pantherine line diverged and originated in Africa. However, molecular phylogenies speculated that wasn’t true, that it was probably out of Asia, but there was no definitive proof for that.

In 2013, a paper was published by Dr. Z. Jack Tseng of the division of Paleontology right here at the American Museum of Natural History. Dr. Tseng and his associates found a cranium fragment, just a small piece, did a [holotyping] of it and, from that cranium fragment, they aged it to 4 to 6 million years. It was found on the Tibetan plateau. That put the oldest fossil record of big cats of panthera back 2 million years and it was definitive proof, at least for the time being, of the probable origin of the pantherine line from Asian and probably likely from the Tibetan plateau.

Dr. Tseng and his associates, this cat, called panthera—it was a completely new species—Panthera blytheae.  This cat was about similar in size to a clouded leopard, but it was most related to the snow leopard. Using the fossil record as well as the molecular phylogenetic data, Dr. Tseng and his associates also did an analysis that puts the divergence of the cat lineages, something we really don’t know much about, back another 7 to 8 million years from what people have been speculating it really was. This is of huge importance and not everybody agrees with this. It’s being fought about right now in the literature.

If it indeed, if the division of all the different cats—small cats, big cats—actually goes back 8 million years prior to what we thought, then that puts that in the Miocene. That puts that in a completely different climactic period that means that a lot of things have to be re-explained about the evolution of these large cats and the other cat groups.

Whenever the Panthera and other cats evolved, whenever that was, what we do know is that the defining period for large cats as a whole was the Pleistocene, starting about 2 million years ago. During the approximately 17 to 18 glacial-interglacial cycles of the Pleistocene, more than 80% of all the large-bodied felids worldwide went extinct. One of those to go extinct was the European jaguar.

Now, just like all the other big cats, we don’t know when the jaguar actually evolved. It’s speculated it could be as much as 4 to 6 million years ago. Some think it could be even further than that. What we do have is fossil evidence of the European jaguar in Asia, in Eurasia, about 1.8 million years ago. Somewhere south of the Caspian Sea and south of the Caucuses, in the area of modern-day Iran.

Now, during the Pleistocene, before it went extinct in response to the great climatic fluctuations, this European jaguar did something that I would only look back up and realize was one of the defining characteristics of this big cat. It roamed over, it started migrating, it started moving over a huge area. Through the present-day Stans, through Russia, all the way to the Bering Strait. This is what I call in my new book, the Pleistocene Jaguar Corridor. It was an interconnected link of jaguar movement from the area of the Caspian Sea all the way out to the Bering Strait, to Beringia, the land bridge.

Now, by the mid-Pleistocene, the European jaguar was to go extinct. But by that time, the European jaguar, gombaszoegensis, had already crossed over and come into North America, forming eventually the Pleistocene North American jaguar—Panthera Augusta.

Now, for a time being Panthera Augusta, Panthera gombaszoegensis—that’s a really tough one, gombaszoegensis—coexisted in a whole Arctic range. Meaning, in the Old World and the New World, until the European jaguar went extinct. And then eventually the Pleistocene jaguar was to go extinct and give rise to the modern-day jaguar.

But in all of the wild what they were forming, which we would not know for many, many years to come and still many people don’t understand it, is what I am calling the modern-day jaguar corridor. They would spread from the Beringia land bridge all the way through North America, heading down into Central America and South America about 300-500,000 years ago.

Now, on their tail, meaning about a million years later, came the one living thing that would forever determine the fate of jaguars and many other species of the world’s wildlife—human beings. Homo sapiens. Homo sapiens arrived across the Beringia land bridge about 30,000 B.C. They then spread southward like the jaguar, following some of the same routes, through North America and into South America. What we don’t know, what we have no understanding of is whether or how much there was interaction between early man and jaguars and other large carnivores. With jaguars in particular we don’t think there was much interaction. Jaguars evolved in the Asian region, in the Tibetan plateau area, spread down into Eurasia. By the time modern man had gotten to Europe, it was about the mid-Pleistocene at the time that the European jaguar was going extinct.

At the time that homo sapiens came down into North America, it’s estimated that throughout most of the Pleistocene there were probably no more than 10,000 breeding adult males of homo sapiens. Not very many people.

The only evidence of some interaction between early man and jaguars is somewhere between 4,000 and 11,000 B.C., where a skeleton of a jaguar and a skeleton of an early homo sapiens, a Paleo-Indian, was found in a cave called Schulte’s Cave in Texas. We have no idea why both of them got there, whether one killed another, but both are buried, fossils of both were found in the same dig.

The only real—the first interaction of humans with jaguars, the first time humans and jaguars take an important role in each other’s life comes about 1,500 B.C. This came only after a long period of time as Paleo-Indians, as prehistoric man really settled down. It was only about 8,000 B.C. that the climate started settling now, into the Holocene. Out of the Pleistocene, into the Holocene

Climate started settling. Modern man conquered fire, started using agricultural techniques and banding now in groups, becoming sedentary instead of nomadic. Once they were able to become sedentary, that’s when they were able to start forming cultures and civilizations and start contemplating what the world was like around them. Why nature existed. Why they couldn’t control or how maybe they could control nature. And this is when they started creating a pantheon of deities.

One of the earliest cultures was the Olmecs, approximately 1,500 B.C., based on central Mexico, right on the Gulf of Mexico. The Olmecs built huge stone heads, about 3.5 meters tall, weighing from 35 to 50 tons. One author called the Olmecs “jaguar psychotics.” The jaguar was the number one in their pantheon of deities. As far as they were concerned, this big beast that roamed around them that they could not control but that seemed to have all the control of nature and that other things were afraid of, this was their god. This was something that had to be emulated.

Early sculptings of the Olmecs show that they actually flattened their children’s heads in order to imitate the cranial structure of the jaguar. They filed down some of their incisors in order to create fang-like teeth. And apparently from some of their early sculpting and writings, what we speculate—I would say “know,” but I don’t think we truly know it—is that, when they had deformed children, when there was something born that was wrong with children, instead of thinking that the gods were looking badly about them, they believed those gods were blessed and that children born with Down’s syndrome, which were a part of many of their sculptings, were actually a cross between a jaguar and a human being. So these children with problems were raised to higher levels in the society.

The Olmecs were also the first ones to create were-jaguars. The whole concept of half-man, half-jaguar came about in the early carvings of the Olmecs. The Olmec culture was what I call the beginning, the mother culture for the Jaguar Cultural Corridor. The Jaguar Cultural Corridor was a minimum of 12 to 14 different cultures and civilizations spread throughout central and South America over about a three-thousand-year period, all of which had the jaguar as a major focus of their lives.

Many of these cultures—the Maya, Aztec, Inca—they built large areas occupied by thousands, sometimes tens of thousands of people. Their iconography was heavily jaguar. There were many other kinds of animals that they worshipped, many others that they thought had power—some of the snakes and birds of prey. But the jaguar ruled supreme among all of them. And in all of their depictions, you can see them trying to show the jaguar not as an animal. It was a god but not a god. It was of this world, but not of this world. They were trying to explain the power and mysticism of this beast that seemed to rule nature all around them.

You could see in all of the early carvings, from the Olmecs, this is a jaguar mouth with a human being sitting inside of a jaguar mouth. But they always made sure that man was not controlled by jaguars. There was always an attempt that humans, even in this earliest time, though the jaguar was seen as a semi-deity, it had to be controlled. You had to find out what the power of the jaguar was, take it unto yourself and control it. So even when man is in the mouth of a jaguar, he’s also holding a knife in one hand and the umbilical cord of the Earth in the other.

Among a Maya carving, some of the early Mayan beliefs was that god put jaguars on the Earth first, men second. Which is actually true. But later, god gave men the ability to use tools and weapons in order to control and kill jaguars and send them back into their piece of the world while man took more control of what he wanted. Also true.

The early people killed jaguars. They respected them, but they killed them. But they didn’t kill them wantonly. They killed them for rituals. They killed for numerous kinds of ceremony. Among the Maya, some of the world’s most amazing astronomical calculations and mathematical calculations have come about, but they’re all imbued with ritual and omens and symbolism. The Maya, some of the great early astronomers would wear jaguar coats. Spread the skin of a jaguar and you spread the evening sky in front of you. That was basically a Mayan proverb. They believed that the jaguar was a map to the celestial heavens.

There was no line between man and jaguar. This was a very important distinction in these early cultures and a very important part of the Jaguar Cultural Corridor. The line between man and jaguar was a blurred one. The jaguar had more power than man, but man had the ability to somehow get that power or figure out how to get that power so that he could ultimately be the controlling force in the jaguar’s life.

But if you killed a jaguar you could be killing a shaman, you could be killing an ancestor. So the killing of jaguars wasn’t done very easily.

The ultimate thing of trying to understand the jaguar was to be a shaman, a jaguar shaman. And what they respected most about a jaguar—not respected so much as couldn’t explain—was the almost god-like shine at night of a jaguar’s eyes. They didn’t know about the reflective layer in nocturnal animals. They didn’t know about that, which most nocturnal animals have and cats have more than many others. They believed that that shine of a jaguar’s eyes at night when you walked through that jungle and the jaguar’s eyes met you was a way to look into the spirit world. And it wasn’t just that. Jaguars wouldn’t run from you. Not only would a jaguar, when they encountered a jaguar in the jungle, you would see the eye shine, but the jaguar would just sit there and stare right back at you, unafraid.

But all that was to change. All that was to change around 1500 when, for the next couple of hundred years, mostly the Spanish and the Portuguese came and colonized and conquered the New World, inadvertently bringing with them diseases, such as measles and diphtheria and typhoid and influenza. They wiped up 90%, more than 90, more than 90% of the indigenous population of the New World. It was basically the end of the Jaguar Cultural Corridor as we knew it, within those indigenous people.

Now, that sounds horrible. And it is horrible for the people. But very often what’s horrible for people is good for wildlife. And this happened to be that case. This is something you will almost never hear talked about, but this is why, when people want to know why the jaguar is doing better than most of the other large cats in the world, why are tigers in such horrible shape? Lions in really pitiful shape. Leopards are starting to really plummet in numbers. Jaguars are threatened, but jaguars seem to have more than the other cats.

There are many reasons why, but one of the most prominent reasons is because, at this time of Spanish conquest, they were given a second chance, something the other cats were never given. They were given a second chance because, at the time of Spanish conquest, there was no such thing as the ecological Indian. There were an approximate number of 10 to 100 million indigenous people occupying Mexico, Central America and large parts of South America. The jaguar was virtually wiped out of Mexico and Central America at the time of Spanish conquest.

So, by the killing of 90% of the indigenous people by a handful, literally, a very small number of Spanish and Portuguese conquerors, who actually not only used disease but also were able to use inter-tribal warfare in order to kill off, have the people kill themselves, most of the jungle that had been cleared around large centers which hadn’t been already abandoned by that time anyway, now came back in the forest. So much forest had been cleared and so much came back that the resulting trees coming back called what was termed “a mini-Ice Age” over in Europe. In terms of a climate change phenomenon.

This gave jaguars a chance to re-inhabit central and South America. If this hadn’t happened by the Spanish and the Portuguese, we would probably at best be looking at a jaguar range right now that encompassed only parts of South America.

The reason we still have them, when we look at the genetic breakdown of present-day jaguars in Central America and Mexico, we see that they are most closely related to the northern South American jaguar.

Now, this was the scene I came onto. In the early 1980s, I ended up in Belize at the request of George Schaller. Because we knew nothing about jaguars. All these things had been happening, but nobody had been doing any work on jaguars. He asked me to go to Belize. When I went to Belize, which had just turned into an independent country from British Honduras, only one to two years earlier, the Mayan Indians who once lived in those magnificent temples now lived in simple, primitive huts near the ruins in the jungle. But they were all converted to Christianity. And they killed jaguars at whim. They killed all the wildlife at whim. They cleared land for slash-and-burn plantations and everything they would encounter would be killed and, if it could be, it would be eaten. If it couldn’t be eaten, it would just be hung up for show.

When I’d asked the Mayans back then why they did this, they said, well, man is supposed to do this. Because this is what Christian teachings teach us. And, indeed, if you listen to parts of Genesis 1:28, basically the Mayans would tell me the same thing. And, indeed, we did conquer and we did rule over the Earth. We killed everything in our path. This is especially in the 60s and the 70s. Not only jaguars were killed at will, but all the other large predators and many other wildlife.

This came to a head in the 1960s and 1970s, actually partly started by Jacqueline Kenney coming out wearing a leopard fur coat. Which, there was nothing wrong with at the time, 1962. That became the huge fashion trend. Spotted cat coats were desired everywhere, even as a dog collar for your dog, if you were wealthy enough. Snow leopard coats, clouded leopard coats, leopard coats, jaguar coats. Hundreds of thousands of skins of jaguars and other spotted cats were sent through New York, was sent through European ports every single year. The cats were declining rapidly, rapidly. There were interviews by some store owners who said that they had to put still bloody skins in the window because they couldn’t sell them fast enough.

The other problem that we were facing at that time was that, everywhere that I went in the early 1980s, jaguars were seen as pests, as vermin, as something to be wiped out. Now, jaguar never knew cattle. Jaguar had never—this was something else brought over by the Spanish in the 15^th century and their system of management, which was basically to leave them roam free over large areas.

So, jaguar, when encountering this huge, large, basically piece of meat which just stood there as they could kill it, of course it became a major food item in certain parts of the jaguar’s range. In places in South America, like in Argentina and Brazil, the biggest jaguars on record were overlapping with cattle ranches, because they had a lot of large biomass to feed upon.

But many other things killed these cattle also, but only the jaguar got blamed. And none of us, again, at the time, when I came onto the scene in 1980, we knew nothing about this. Did jaguar really kill a lot of cattle? Did they eat other things other than cattle? We just didn’t know.

But the good thing was that by the time—the 1970s and … 1960s, 1970s, 1980s saw such a decline in spotted cat skins that people got scared. People woke up. In the mid-1970s, in 1975 an international convention called CITES banned all the trade in spotted cat skins. That was great. That really slowed down the killing of spotted cats.

Also, throughout 70s and 80s, with the economies of central and South America in a complete tailspin, governments actually started realizing that, if they wanted their economies to grow, that they had to take better care of the environment. And most of the protected areas throughout Mexico, Central America and South America today were set up in the 1970s and 1980s. And these were major areas where the jaguars lived and bred.

So, again, the jaguar got another reprieve, after being almost massacred into extinction during the fashion industry of the 60s, it now had another reprieve, with new protected areas and new laws. People still killed jaguars. People still viewed them as vermin. But the killing and the trade in them went way, way down.

I was asked in 1980, ’80, ’81, by George Schaller to go to the country of Belize and study jaguars. Schaller had been the only one, followed by a man named Howard Quigley, who now works with me, who had tried to do a capture, radio-collaring, a systematic study of jaguars down in the Pantanal in Brazil. But no one had yet ever studied them, found out anything about them in the tropical rainforest, their typical habitat throughout central, South America and Mexico. This is all the material of my first book, Jaguar, but it sets it up for everything else.

So, in 1982, I believe it was (I don’t even know when it was now). the New York Zoological Society, who George said that he and I both worked for, gave me several thousand dollars, which was a lot of money at the time. I bought a pickup truck and I drove it from New York to Belize. I was young and I was stupid and I thought I could do anything. Most of the things I did in those years I would never do again.

And I just set out to capture jaguars. I had no idea how in the beginning, because we tried numerous ways. But my job was, according to George Schaller, this was the paradigm of wallet conservation at the time. Get scientific data. Publish that scientific data. Then get out. Because you give it to the world and it’s up to the world then to take care of what has to come next. Which we all now know never happens that way.

So I would capture jaguars, figuring out, finally, how to capture them by some old jaguar hunters with cages built of [rebar]. I captured several jaguars. Drugged them, radio-collared them. Did all the normal things. Set them back free. Spent months and months and months—because back then we had no satellite collars, had no GPS collars. It was all radio collars and that meant that you had to be out in the jungle, flying an airplane or somewhere near them in order to hear that signal. So all my time was taken up trying then to find the jaguar.

Now, I wish I had had more experience, more thought about me at the time in order to really see what I was, or try to understand what I was seeing. Because that would only come much, much later. But too many other things interfered. One of my men got killed as were chasing a jaguar by a snake called a fer-de-lance, sitting at the base of a tree where a jaguar ran up. That was terrible and for a large chunk of time, all the people quit. Nobody would work with me because I was seen to be jinxed. Because killing a jaguar was okay. Catching one, drugging it, putting something on it and setting it back free, that was not normal. That was not seen as good.

Then we had a plane crash. Again, so many of these things was the result of—some of them weren’t my fault—but they were the result of inexpert…just not being able to say “no” and saying “I will get this done at no matter what cost. And I don’t care.” If there’s a rainstorm coming and I had to find a jaguar, we’d fly in the rainstorm. Something I wouldn’t do today.

So our plane crashed and that was—none of us died, but there were some fairly injuries, but we all got back to doing what we had to do eventually and that was study the jaguar.

Now, in these early years, in the early 1980s to mid-1980s, everything I was gathering—everything—was new. Anything I would gather about jaguars was new. And I understood that. It was new science. It was publishable. But I really wasn’t putting all the things together. But even back then, I started realizing how amazing, how amazing this beast was.

Charles Darwin was the first one to actually recognize, in Uruguay, where jaguars are now extinct, that jaguars scratched trees in order to communicate. But I was watching how jaguars had a voice, how jaguars had a language, a complex language, almost like the Mayan hieroglyphics. The jaguars, whether it was a piece of feces, urine, urine and feces, anal sense, scratching of a tree, scratch and feces. There would be no end to the number of combinations of a jaguar either talking to another jaguar or a jaguar talking to other [con specifics 35:10]. This is how they communicated, whether sometimes actually vocalizing or just leaving marks. It was unheard of—although it did happen a few times—it was virtually unheard of for there to be encounters, any truly aggressive encounters jaguar-jaguar or jaguar-other cats because they would be reading the signs. Whether it was a male looking for a female, a male saying I’m in this area, a small male saying can I walk here? It was a complete language, one no one fully understands.

I also studied all the animals that were with the jaguar. The mountain lion. The margay. The ocelot. They were thriving. They were there in abundance. Yet all the signs showed they knew when to stay away. They walked, lived in the same areas as jaguars, walked the same paths as jaguars, but not when a jaguar was walking that path. And I could see the language, see the communication between them.

Then there was the prey of the jaguars. I realized jaguars seemed to be eating a lot of different things. In my area, it was amazing. I seemed to have a lot of healthy jaguars. There was no shortage of them. They were big and healthy. But they were only eating armadillo. I didn’t get it. Now, I knew that they ate all kinds of prey. They ate everything from the 400-kilogram tapir, rocket deer, peccaries, all the way down to all the small prey—the agouties, rabbits, coatimundis, the 1-kilogram tinamou, tree iguanas. They would eat it all. And I thought, how incredible is that? Originally I thought what a waste of energy. Because I didn’t realize adaptive that truly was. My jaguars fed primarily on armadillo because the hunting camp I was stationed in had wiped out most of the peccaries and the larger prey. Did the jaguars leave? No, they could adapt. These were all things I would start to put together and understand only much later in my life and my career of studying jaguar.

The other thing I knew but didn’t quite understand, but boy, I felt it, the jaguars were known, and it was only later proven, but the jaguars were thought at the time to have the most powerful jaws of any cat per body size in the world. Jaguar skulls were smaller than lions and tigers, but pound-for-pound, jaguars have the most powerful, crushing bite of any cat in the world.

And this is why, when they hunt, they don’t hunt like other cats. They don’t go for the—even tigers. Tigers go for the throat. Jaguars almost never go to the throat unless it’s an accident. Jaguars go for two places. They go for the skull, the top of the skull or they go for the top of the cervical vertebrae and crunch that cervical vertebrae. With those jaws, they grab and they hold they crunch.

Now, never was this more apparent to me—the only thing that set my hair on edge as much as that growing sound I played for you at first, was when I’d be walking in the forest, and this happened fairly regularly, and I find a kill, such as this peccary kill, where the jaguar had killed it. It had lifted off its cranial cap. It had just punctured through the cranium, just threw its neck back and lifted off that cranial cap. And there was jungle all around me. This is how powerful an animal this was.

The other thing I was seeing all the time in my early days, but I never put two-and-two together, again, until later, until new discoveries made me try to think of reasons why the jaguar was acting a certain way was that the jaguar didn’t care where it went. It could go anywhere. It could go anywhere. Yes, leopards climb trees really well. Tigers don’t climb trees well. Tigers are really good with water. Leopards don’t like water very well. Lions, lions don’t climb trees well. Lions are pretty ambivalent about water.

But the jaguar, the jaguar, the third-largest cat in the world, loves it all. Nothing stops it. It’s got a huge affinity for water. Swims back and forth with ease, any large body of water. Climbs trees almost like an arboreal species—actually can hunt in trees sometimes. And of course it has total command of the terrestrial surface. This animal operates in the trees, it can be arboreal when it needs to be, terrestrial or aquatic.

Only later it would come to me, much later, and that’s what I write about in my new book, much later it would come to me that none of this, none of what we would soon discover with the Jaguar Corridor should have been a surprise, none of it. If I had been smarter, if others had really looked closer, if we as human beings had stopped putting boxes around our knowledge, we would have seen it. Because this was the jaguar of the Pleistocene. This was the jaguar with all the resilience that created the Pleistocene Corridor, now surviving in these kinds of environments. The modern jaguar had recreated itself post-Pleistocene. The European jaguar and the Pleistocene jaguar were approximately 25% bigger than this jaguar. This jaguar had gotten smaller. It had gotten more compact. The third-largest animal in the world. A massive head. A massive skull. It has massive paws to grab its prey. Huge, stout limbs. It’s a little sumo wrestler. Low to the ground. Stalks its prey and ambushes.

But the amazing thing about it, it occupies all areas. It can climb—due to its limbs, due to its paws, due to its morphological structure, and its behavioral changes, partially influenced, I believe, by the Pleistocene, this animal can be a big small cat when it has to, when the pressures are on it, which don’t allow it to be a big cat. And it can be a small big cat when it has to.

Structurally, morphologically, it sits there as the third-largest cat in the world. But it’s got amazing qualities to it. Physiologically, this is something most people don’t even know and only one study has looked at it. Physiologically, pound-for-pound, the jaguar eats much less per pound of body size than the lion and the tiger, eats as much as the mountain lion, but eats less than smaller cats, like the lynx and jaguarundi. So its physiology allows it to live on smaller pretty. It can occupy all realms of the habitat. It could survive where all the big prey has been wiped out. This is a truly resilient beast.

But at that time, I had no idea of any of this. At that time, I was young. I was crazy. I just wanted adventure in my life as well as new scientific data, new scientific publications. And my job, according to George Schaller and my employer was get the data, write the papers and then move on to something else that needs you. Even that I couldn’t do at the time. Even that. I realized too many jaguars were being killed all around me. So I asked George Schaller if I could stay an extra few months. And, in those few months, I appealed to the government and we set up the world’s first jaguar preserve. A new preserve for Belize. At the time Belize had no preserves at all. We set up the world’s first jaguar preserve.

I thought this was what the end should really be. I felt very proud of myself. I wanted a place that people could walk in the jungle, maybe tourists from outside, pay money and local people, the Mayan Indians who had been killing the jaguar now could have jobs and be working for the jaguar. All of this occurred. And I thought this was great.

My feeling was, as was that of George Schaller, because we talked about it, that we had opened the door. His work in Brazil, Howard Quigley, Peter [Kruschwitz’] work, my work in Central America setting up the world’s first jaguar preserve. There were tons of bright young people out there. Lots of bright, Latin American students. Lots of bright North American students, who would then follow us up, follow up and study jaguars. We fully expected that after we could show that jaguars could be captured, radio-collared, followed, that there’d be tons of studies, that we’d know all there was to know about jaguars. We would know numbers. How they were killing cattle. And that would take place. So I left. I moved on. Because I was told by my employer it was time to move on and I wanted to.

So, for the next 20 years, I travelled throughout Asia and also parts of North America doing work on tigers, on Asiatic leopards, on clouded leopards, and a little work on mountain lions.

But by the turn of the 20^th century, by 1999, especially with what I had been seeing in the tiger world, I was desperately worried about jaguars. All the work I thought would materialize had not. Yes, there were more stories. There were bright people going out there and trying to do a little more work. But it just wasn’t happening. It wasn’t happening because the conservation world is terribly broken in many ways. They weren’t funding this kind of work. There were lots of jungles and jaguars, so people thought. Though we had no idea how many, especially with them being killed all the time.

Young people weren’t getting funded to do this work. It just-new areas, new protected areas seemed to grind to a halt. Nothing new, not much new had gotten done since I left in the mid-80s, up until the mid-to-late 1990s. This was terrible. And what I learned with the tiger, I was absolutely certain that that would happen with the jaguar, unless we got behind the 8-ball, unless we got behind the curve. You don’t wait—you don’t do crisis management if you want to manage. You don’t wait until something’s on the edge of a cliff if you really want to save it. You save it when it still can be saved. Although that’s not what conservation often pushes.

So I went back to the jaguar in 1999. Now, the preserve had been doing well. People were coming. It had gotten international renown. It had actually started a whole cottage industry for the local people and it started the protected area system that we now know for Belize today. All those protected areas started with the Cockscomb.

So that was great. But that model wasn’t being replicated anywhere, it seemed. People weren’t killing jaguars as much, due to laws. A lot of countries had signed into laws no killing of jaguars, but there was no respect. People might not kill them, but they were still seen as our plaything. Believe or not, this picture is only a couple of years old, taken down at Pepe’s Bar in Orlando, Florida. We do this all the time. There are tons of pictures I could show like this.

Because we think we love these animals, but they’re our toys. They’re our recreational playthings. How do to change that? Well, if I couldn’t change human behavior, what we could do is at least do a priority—do what we were doing with tigers, but on a much grander scale. Do a priority-setting exercise. Too often conservation is about where somebody has money to work or where a particular organization gets a good grant in order to work. It’s not strategic. I wanted to go back and look throughout jaguar range, figure out where the jaguars were. I know I couldn’t save all of them, but then try to strategically save them, save key populations throughout their range.

So in 1999 we held a meeting of the world’s 30 jaguar experts in Mexico City. And we asked them for a week to sit with maps and draw the map of jaguar range, delineating all the different habitat types or geographic regions where the known jaguar populations were. We did that first in 1999, then we repeated it with over 100 people in 2006. This gave us what we called JCUs—Jaguar Conservation Units. Where were the breeding populations of jaguars? Where were the animals that we had to save? And then what I would do is, with limited money, try to figure out how we save representative populations, because it was thought there was somewhere between 8 subspecies and 15 subspecies of jaguars. How do you save the representative subspecies throughout the representative habitat types?

The only way it could be done, which is a word I always hated, but I felt was the reality of conservation, is triage. Triage, believe it or not, is a term coined in the Napoleonic Wars, but it was actually first put into real practice by French doctors in World War I. Triage, of course, as all of you probably are well aware, is where you let those which are sure to die, die. You let those which, if you don’t have to treat them will probably live. And you work on those which will live if you treat them and die if you don’t.

That’s what I felt we had to do with the jaguars, we had to do with the populations. This was cutting edge. I was lauded. Our team was lauded throughout the conservation world for thinking so strategically and so broad-minded for the jaguar. This was a conservation model unlike any other at the time.

Then an amazing thing happened. Call it luck. Call it serendipity. Call it fate. Because things happen when you make them happen to some point. But new genetic tools had come into being just a few years prior. DNA fingerprinting, which was known since the early to mid-1980s but using samples which you had to actually obtain from the person or from the animal, like skin or blood or hair. Now, just three years prior to 1999, I believe the first paper published was 1996, actually had adapted the techniques of DNA fingerprinting for fecal matter. For non-invasive sampling. You could use feces, which you could get by the hundreds, hopefully, without ever having to see an animal, touch it—it was actually used, of course, first for human feces.

And that had been perfected in the late 1990s. And, as a result of our meeting in 1999, a couple of geneticists had been working on that with jaguars, taking samples from captive jaguars throughout their range, trying to get at how many subspecies there might really be, using the real technique, DNA fingerprinting, instead of just morphology—what color it is, how big it is—using DNA, how many races of jaguars did we really have?

And amazing thing happened. I actually didn’t read the paper. We had over 70 papers from this conference. It was one of the last papers that I ended up reading, because genetics is not my forte, as my wife will tell you.

But the last sentence of the abstract of that paper made a light bulb go off in my head. The last sentence was “evidence of continued gene flow between populations.” These were typical geneticists. They didn’t say “A-ha!” I’m not even sure they knew exactly what the implications were of those first genetic results. But that sentence—“evidence of continued gene flow between populations.”

They were unable to find any racial differentiation. None. The jaguar in the American southwest that comes up from northern Mexico was the same jaguar as the jaguar of Central America, was the same jaguar of the—300-to-350 pound jaguar of the Pantanal in Brazil. There was no more priority. Priority-setting got thrown out the window. Triage got thrown out the window (gratefully, I hated that word). There was no more triage. It was all important. Every place the jaguar went, they were only one species, no races.

What did that mean? That meant that somehow all the places we were writing off, the black holes that we thought were contributing to fragmentation of jaguar habitat—now, jaguars didn’t live here, but somehow this incredible animal, something else I should have seen earlier—it was the Pleistocene jaguar all over again. Somehow they were making their way through these areas just enough to get from population to population, from Mexico through Argentina. Enough animals were making their way to create and to maintain genetic vigor between populations. And there was not enough breakage in the system, even with all of this to say that there were different subspecies of jaguars.

This made the jaguar the only large wide-ranging mammal in the world, to this day, with no definitive subspecies.

This is because they move. This is because jaguars—this is when I started putting it all together. This is because jaguars occupy trees and land and water, nothing stops them. And they go. They’ve got it in their basic genetic structure to move. Whether this is a holdover, maybe epigenetically from the Pleistocene, but something in the jaguar allows it, in the face of environmental perturbations, in the face of catastrophic events, it goes. It investigates. It tries to find new areas and nothing will stop it.

Thus was born the Jaguar Corridor Imitative, now based out of Panthera. No more let’s save a jaguar here or save a jaguar here. Everything was important. This was the Pleistocene jaguar having recreated itself and actually the Pleistocene Corridor had never gone away. It shifted. The Pleistocene jaguar had moved through Beringia into North America and the Jaguar Corridor throughout North and central and South America, I imagine it had been broken for a time by the indigenous people in the tens of millions, and I’m not even sure of that. They had been finding their way so that genetically the Pleistocene Corridor had now shifted into the modern, modern-day corridor. So we had to figure out how this was possible.

We did something called a cost-benefit analysis. Just to simplify it, basically, it’s a very simple technique. All the jaguar experts determined what characteristics of the environment jaguars like and can move through and which would stop a jaguar from moving? What would actually stop them dead versus allowing them to maybe sneak through? And there were different things that we classified, scored and added them and did what’s called a dispersal cost surface.

But the point is, that simple analysis, and it was simple, just pointed to an amazing fact by itself. Just by looking at where jaguars live, we thought that the historic jaguar range has decreased by over 60%. Jaguars only live in 40% of their historic range. That’s true. That’s a fact. But if you look at jaguar permeability of habitat, places jaguars could move, maybe not live, they still maintained over 80% of their historic habitat.

So much of jaguar world, at least for movement, was still very much intact. When you factor that down to the best pathways where a jaguar might be moving through all of that habitat, then you get an image of the Jaguar Corridor. If you look at Jaguar JCUs in dark green, where the jaguars live, that amounts through the Jaguar Corridor to 2 million square kilometers. The Jaguar Corridor amounts to 2.5 million square kilometers. So what we’re dealing with now, from having gone to a idea of triage, we now went to a necessity of saying we minimally have to try to protect 4.5 square kilometers of jaguar land.

There’s not an option. It’s not a “can we.” We will. In different ways, we will. Now, look at what—if we had not known from the genetic data what was happening, this is what Jaguar World would have looked like. We would have only attempted to save 10-20% of those JCUs. Versus this entire Jaguar Corridor, which we are actually putting into place right now. We started in Central America because Central America started with the Mesoamerica Biological Corridor. So we put that in place.

I didn’t believe—I’ve got to tell you, no matter what the data said, I myself, I myself wasn’t sure it was real. So, for the first Jaguar Corridors, I got on the ground and I went through the areas in Costa Rica and Panama. Sure enough, checking and seeing if jaguars were really moving through areas. This was not easy to do, because according to the computer models, for genetic vigor to be maintained between populations, you need no less than one, but no more than 10 individuals per generation of jaguars to move from a population to another population. That’s a very small number of animals. I wasn’t sure we’d be able to find evidence of that small number. But it turns out we did find evidence, because many more than that number actually use these Jaguar Corridors.

And I stopped doing it myself and with my team—and we of course had teams in every country, and including specialized scat dogs here that can sniff out scat, sniff out only jaguar scat. We worked with local people, interviewed local people, what they saw. Set up camera traps. Trained local people in how to collect feces.

And, of course, talked to the local people about why they were still killing jaguars, getting the data from them. Whereas in the past this would have been seen as an adversarial event. These are people outside of a jaguar protected area killing a jaguar. This is no longer seen as outside of jaguar world. This is in the Jaguar Corridor. All this is jaguar world. Cattle killing is part of the conservation model of saving jaguars. What the local people do, what they think, how they do. People have now become part of the solution, not just viewed as adversaries or the main part of the problem.

Now, this took huge amounts of work. Just the computer models took huge amounts of work. Just the maps took years to produce. But I couldn’t go to governments, I couldn’t try to implement this in reality till we actually verified it on the ground. Country by country. Corridor by corridor. This took over…well, it’s still going on right now as I speak, but it’s been well over 10 years and we’ve just finished Central America.

Now, we couldn’t have done any of this without the genetics. In 2006, Panthera partnered with the Sackler Institute for Comparative Genomics here at the Museum and started the Global Felid Conservation Genetics Program. This program is now the largest felid genetics program in the world, with the largest database of jaguar feces (something to be known for), the largest database of jaguar feces in the world.

The genetics would tell us if we were on the right path. We would take a piece of a corridor we wanted to [ground truth 1:02:51 , collect feces, and the genetics would tell us, yes, indeed, they are connected and who’s related to whom and these are the areas you should look at. Then we’d get on the ground and piece-by-piece we would cut it up into quadratic blocs and survey—that’s something called “occupancy surveys.” We would look at areas where there seemed to be the highest priority. Our highest priority initially was Honduras. Believe it or not, the model, the computer model showed that the Jaguar Corridor was broken and I was terrified. It showed it was broken in an area I could well imagine it be broken, which is San Pedro Sula, known at that time and still today, as the murder capital of the world. The number, it has gone beyond Mexico as being the number one place for drug-related murders.

But we had to investigate if the Jaguar Corridor was really broken. Genetic data said it wasn’t. So where was that corridor? Because the computer, based on good characteristics, wouldn’t come up with the corridor. And, indeed, once again, what’s not always good for people is good for the jaguars. Outside of the murder capital of the world was a mountain and a piece of forest where drug deals went on, bodies got dumped. And we went in there and surveyed it and jaguars are moving through that area. That’s a piece of the Jaguar Corridor.

We also started looking at things we never would have looked at. Stepping stone islands. The average corridor in Central America is about 150 kilometers. Average corridor in South America is about 500 kilometers. Some of the corridors are as much as a thousand. Jaguars can do that. But they don’t usually have to do that, because in the landscape are tiny stepping stone islands, which we would have written off. Never would have been thought of as part of a jaguar conservation model. Now these become crucial to get protected and make sure that they stay as little islands if jaguars go in and use them.

The most obvious island—jaguar people said, when we found the corridor, “what about the Panama Canal”? I said, well, the data shows that they’re swimming the Panama Canal. When I went to the Panama Canal, local people knew that jaguars did swim the Panama Canal, but scientists had no idea.

Barro Colorado Island, run by the Smithsonian, is a stepping stone. Some of the people started putting out camera traps and got one of the only pictures ever taken of a jaguar on Barro Colorado Island. It was there and it was gone. It had come on and then it was off and they found tracks of the jaguar on the other side.

Then we could go to the government. Once we had the data, only when we had solid data, I could appeal to the government. This is also something conservation doesn’t do as well as it should. You always do have to work on the ground and work from the ground up. But the ground up is not enough, that’s half the picture. You also have to work from the top-down and get government buy-in on what you do.

Country by country, as we verify jaguar corridors and got the data, I would go meet with ministers and heads of state. This is Vice President, former Vice President Santos, his cousin is current president of Colombia. These are all ministers of Honduras, Colombia, Costa Rica. Country by country we signed agreements putting the Jaguar Corridor into the countries’ archives.

In other words, once a minister, once it got to that level and they agreed that the Jaguar Corridor should exist within their country, then it went into their developmental database. So anytime a development project went in, if it went in through the Jaguar Corridor, it popped up a red flag.

This meant that before the fact we could work with development projects. It didn’t mean we stopped development projects. It meant we did something that governments love and the developers love. We could work with them before the fact, instead of after the fact when the problem was already there and it would take millions and millions of dollars to solve it. Before putting in a road, before putting in a dam, before a massive monoculture of oil palm. We could figure out what they had to leave, what they had to do. We’re currently working with the International Development Bank in Costa Rico on a major dam project. It’s to be the largest dam in Central America.

We’re currently working with Nicaragua on something I hope never happens—it’s the new canal they plan to rival the Panama Canal, be much, much wider and cut across all Nicaragua. We worked with them before the fact. Not to try to stop them. Not blockade them. But figure out if and how jaguars can still-jaguars and other species, can make it through that landscape. If they can’t, we will try to stop or change that project. But usually they can. Usually, if started early enough, there are ways of finding out.

The Jaguar Corridor has become the largest functional conservation model in the world right now. Working on two continents, we’re creating and getting signed into law functional corridors for these animals, which also end up being corridors and living spaces for many other animals. It doesn’t mean we’re setting aside 2.5 million square kilometers in new protected areas. It means we’re doing zoning, something conservation has never done. It’s either protected or it’s human landscape. It doesn’t have to be that way. We can learn from zoning laws. We get land zoned a certain way so that animals, even if they can’t live there can move through it. This is how large predators can live better with human beings.

One thing I have learned from all my years of working on jaguars, which has been many, is that I cannot underestimate this animal. In fact, we should never underestimate any animals. But with the jaguar, which is closest to my heart and I probably know better than any other, every time I stop underestimating it, every time I broke down the boxes of my knowledge around thinking what it should be doing as a human scientist, that’s when I started learning new things. That’s when I started asking the right questions of people and getting different kinds of answers.

That’s when I started looing for and seeing something like this. This is in the Pantanal. If you ever asked me, if you drew this picture and said, “Can a jaguar jump like that?,” I would have said “no.” Why would I have said no? How the hell do I know? In fact, jaguars do jump like that.

But our scientific mind, Einstein said one of the biggest obstacles to science are scientists. And sometimes that is absolutely the truth. You should never underestimate this animal.

In my book, I try to get at what I call “jaguarness.” Because I believe this is not a mystical thing. There is something special about the jaguar. Maybe it’s found in different ways in other cats and other large predators also, but the jaguar has something that is born of the Pleistocene. We now know through epigenetic research that those kinds of qualities, if the animal doesn’t go extinct, can be passed on if the environmental stresses stay there.

This jaguarness, the only word I have ever found to somewhat come close to describing jaguars, is fudōshin. Fudōshin is a Japanese term meant to explain the mindset of only the most accomplished of Japanese martial artists. It means immovable. It means imperturbable. It means indomitable. This is truly what the jaguar is.

A jaguar will keep this and it will need all of this to survive. But I was also thinking too much inside the box about people. I wasn’t opening my mind there, either, until I was late in the game here in the Jaguar Corridor. I thought the Jaguar Corridor—Cultural Corridor—was dead and gone. And, in truth, the Jaguar Cultural Corridor as it was in indigenous, as it was in the early times of cultures like, civilizations like Maya and Olmec and Inca and Aztec. That is pretty much gone. There are a few very small, remote areas in the Amazon where there are people like this, like the Matsés in the Peruvian and Brazilian Amazon which call themselves “cat people,” still do some of the old ways. But this is dying out. This is virtually gone. In 2011, UNESCO declared jaguar shamanisms to be one of the cultural traditions most in danger of extinction. This will be gone.

But what’s not gone, what I didn’t realize is that the Jaguar Cultural Corridor, like the Pleistocene Jaguar Corridor, has not disappeared. It’s morphed. It’s shifted. It’s changed. The Jaguar Cultural Corridor, the culture binding people and jaguars is also still there. It’s just there in a different way. The people who have learned to appreciate and value jaguars, whether it’s because jaguars are now bringing tourists and money to them and they’re creating things, or whether it’s because that jaguars are still part of their traditional Christian, often Christian festivals, or sometimes part of their educational systems. People still value jaguars in a way that I had never understood. I was looking too much on the surface. As I went and interviewed all the local people in places where not only jaguars still live, but in places where they no longer did, like the Tolupan in Honduras, what I learn is that everywhere people who live with jaguars feel that there’s a power in their environment, feel that their lives are better off for having jaguars with them than had they not had jaguars.

In areas where they once had jaguars and no longer have them, old people and, more important young people—young people who’d never seen a jaguar, never seen a jaguar track, but have heard the stories, feel that they’re lesser of a people for it. They don’t know how. They don’t even know why. But they feel—and I was told, in their words, that they were weaker, they were not as strong. Their culture was not as strong and they were weaker as human beings. The Maya, the [Lokanda] Maya believe that, for every jaguar killed, a star falls in the sky. I would hear this kind of thing. Maybe not in those words, from the young people who never even saw a jaguar. They felt their culture was weak.

People who lived with jaguars, maybe they got really frustrated—jaguars took their dogs, killed some of their cattle. None of them wanted jaguars gone. They realized that their lives meant more for having jaguars with them.

The Jaguar Cultural Corridor started possibly in the Olmec homeland, was not dead, it was transformed. Just as the modern-day Jaguar Corridor, genetic corroder exists, we know it exists, the Jaguar Cultural Corridor still exists also. But like so many things, it changes with the times.

Now, in order to survive, jaguars in their JCUs, in their viable populations, they’ve got to figure out how to breed—now, jaguars are very good at this. Jaguars have a gestation of only about three months. They can have up to four young. The young stay with them two to three years. Jaguars live about 12-to-15 years in the wild, double that in captivity. They’re one of the longest-living cats in the world.

Jaguars have all the tools to bring up young and to send those young out into the world. But if they make it through the corridors and whether those corridors still exist, it’s going to be up to the younger people. It’s going to be up to the people who live among jaguars—this is an old, old people. I brought up these three girls. All these three girls are now grown and have babies. She became the first female warden of the Cockscomb Jaguar Preserve and the first female warden in all of Belize.

They are the future, whether living in the Jaguar Corridor, or the young people living outside the Jaguar Corridor or living outside Jaguar World, who want to be part of conservation, part of something meaningful.

It’s young people, children understand—the line that the indigenous people saw as a permeable line between man and jaguar, man and cat, children still see that. Children still do that in their play. Children realize that line is not that solid. They know that within each of us is the cat. All of us.

All living things have a voice. And that voice has to be heard. Only when we hear that voice and listen to it can we understand the value of other living things to our own well-being and to the well-being of the Earth on which we live.

Thank you.

MODERATOR: So, thank you again Alan.

RABINOWITZ: I’m sorry it was so long.

MODERATOR: We’ll still be able to open it up to the audience for a few questions, Alan. So if anyone has any questions, you can just raise your hand and I’ll try to get to a few of you.  Anyone?  There you go.

QUESTION: That was a very amazing talk. I have a two-part question. One is, is the roaming behavior of jaguars exclusively due to selective pressure because of environmental changes or is it part of the natural behavior and, if so, how far do they roam, normally? And the second part is, is there actually any data for epigenetic modifications playing a role in this behavior?

RABINOWITZ: For epigenetic…?  No, let me answer that second question first. There’s no clear data of epigenetics playing a role in jaguar behavior, per se. But as you know from the question, I’m assuming, there’s numerous studies on epigenetics showing how the behavioral patterns can be changed from generation to generation, especially in relation to stress. So that offspring born of more stressed parents often are more adaptable, more adaptive to new stresses that are produced in their controlled environment. These are controlled experiments; the one I’m thinking of happens to be on chicks. But the epigenetic experiments, of course, where we’ve shown what can be passed down within a generation—like a rat running through a maze and then the rat taking weeks and weeks or months to learn that maze and then its offspring get through that maze in half the time, their offspring in one-quarter of that time, these are all very controlled experiments. There’s no data for the jaguars.

In terms of traveling, I don’t think it’s related—I think it’s a behavioral adaptation. I think jaguars can adapt not only to environmental stresses in their roaming, but for instance, when they hunt prey. One of their favorite preys are the peccaries. Peccaries will travel in bands over large distances and not stay in any one, small area. Jaguars, which maintain a very limited home range, often, will often just leave that home range, break it on the spur of a moment, if there’s a peccary herd coming through, and travel for miles after that peccary herd, take the peccary or not, I’m not sure, and then they come back to their ranges.

There is in other cats, we’re really lacking dispersal data, movement data, in jaguars, mainly because, once an animal starts traveling 500 kilometers or so, it’s really hard to follow it and it often gets killed. We do know in mountain lion data, of course, from the States, where the animals are not killed as much and it’s better controlled, that they can travel over a thousand kilometers. I forgot what the record was, but 1,000, 1,500 kilometers in their dispersals. So it’s not jaguars which are doing that.

QUESTION: What about the black panther? Is it the same genes as the jaguar?

RABINOWITZ: I don’t know why I always get asked about the black panther, seems every place I go…

The panther is a generic term. There is no animal “the panther.” It’s most often used for the leopard, for the black leopard. It is used sometimes for the mountain lion without it being black, it’s never been shown to be black. There is a black phase of the jaguar, a dark, melanistic phase of the jaguar which sometimes is called the black panther, but that’s kind of a misnomer. So a black panther generally, in my experience, when people say “black panther,” they’re more often than not referring to a black leopard.

But the panther is—there’s no cat that’s a panther.

QUESTION: What would have induced these animals at some time in the Pleistocene to follow such a well-ordered path, over a land bridge that was temporary and down like that…?

RABINOWITZ: Okay, that was a very, very, very simple drawing. It wasn’t a well-ordered path. It was like if you took a thousand people and released them and said find the way to a certain place, most—it’s like everything about the Jaguar Corridor. Most of the animals don’t make it through the Jaguar Corridor. Most of them will go other ways. Most of them will get killed. You only need—if you needed a lot of animals to succeed, it wouldn’t have succeeded.

Most of the European jaguars likely got wiped out. Many of them went all over the place. I mean, I’m assuming, I don’t know, because we don’t have fossil evidence. But the likelihood is that it didn’t just get on a path and find its way to Beringia. That was the eventual corridor that got established. And I actually thought about drawing in almost a spider web of lines all over the place, because that’s more likely what had occurred.

So the jaguar didn’t know, it can move large distances. So if you try to escape some environmental, catastrophic event, if all of us do in the room and we just take off, it’s going to depend on who can move the furthest and the fastest and the farthest, but it’s also going to depend on luck who chooses the right way to go.

MODERATOR: I was just wondering, it’s amazing you signed all these agreements with all these leaders and people and I was just trying to figure out, what’s in it for them? In other words…

RABINOWITZ: That’s a very good question.

QUESTION: My other question is, if the people cherish the jaguar so much, why is any of this even necessary?

RABINOWITZ: Okay, I’m not a big believer in altruism. I don’t see it, I haven’t seen it much in my career, in my life. Something’s always in it for them.

But the fact is, it’s an interesting phenomenon. There’s no government, when I’ve been working on tigers or leopards or clouded leopards or jaguars, it doesn’t matter. I have never met a government that wants to be the government that lost its tigers. And tigers is a good example because many of the governments are. And I can often get the governments to do things that—the tiger, the big cats, tigers, jaguars, lions—they’re seen as a very—they’re seen as a country’s heritage, as part of their treasure trove.

It’s not politically good for them to lose the biggest predator in their country, so politics absolutely plays a role. All of these countries in Latin America come under—there are lots of NGOs and they come under lots of pressure from environmental NGOs that they’re raping the land, allowing too many mines or dams or roads.

We offer them something that, frankly, can paint them a little green with not much trouble. Because we’re often not asking for a new protected area. They see the benefit—the benefit of saying, you don’t have to make a new protec—these jaguars have made the corridor already. I mean, we’re having a much harder time with tigers trying to create a corridor for them. Or the elephants. With the jaguars, that corridor’s there. It’s already there. And it’s there because local people are already doing things which allow the jaguars to be there.

So we’re just asking for land use zoning in those areas which take into account both what the local people want—because they don’t want to be flooded out by a dam or moved away by a four-lane highway. So it’s completely politic—they love it because the local people, they can say, Look what we’re doing for the local people. And it’s good for the—as long as the jaguar can still move through it. It doesn’t matter…it’s not like if there’s a citrus plantation that has to stay a citrus plantation. If somebody changes a citrus plantation into a cattle ranch, into a backyard garden, into an oil palm plantation, those would all he feasible. If they wanted to flood the whole area out, that would not be feasible.

So it’s not altruism and I don’t see—there is no … when I say that the Jaguar Corridor still exists among local people, that doesn’t mean a love of the jaguar. Some of those people in the Jaguar Corridor are really angry at the jaguar. They want us to help them find ways of not having their cattle killed or their children be able to safely go and collect water and not being scared. But they still don’t want … they still feel that the jaguar in their environment is something special for them. That’s the root of the corridor. And that gives us a starting point for being able to work with them. Because I’ve only met two ranchers in my entire career who wanted to see all jaguars dead. No one else. Even ranchers losing lots of cattle, small, big ranchers and other people, they did not want to see all the jaguars killed if we could find a way that they didn’t have to take an economic loss for the presence of jaguars. And that’s a fair enough challenge to us.

MODERATOR: Thank you. And for the sake of time, I think we’re going to end there, because Alan will also be out signing books after. So if you can all join me again in thanking Alan again.