University Place

[gentle music] - Norman Gilliland: Welcome to University Place Presents.

I'm Norman Gilliland.

The jaguar is a resilient and efficient predator who was once numerous from the jungles of South America to the arid mountains of northern Mexico.

But today, a million years after it first appeared in the New World, the jaguar has disappeared from large parts of its former habitat, and it's endangered in many parts of its range.

Facing decreased habitat, climate change, and human predators, the iconic mega cat seems to be running out of time.

What will it take to keep the jaguar from extinction?

And who are some of the players in the struggle for its survival?

With me is James Campbell, far-ranging journalist and author of a variety of survival stories, most recently Heart of the Jaguar.

Welcome to University Place Presents.

– James Campbell: Thank you very much, Norman.

I'm happy to be here.

- As we get into this story about the continuation of the effort to conserve jaguars, I have to ask.

There are a lot of things that need conservation, need restoration.

What got you interested specifically in the jaguar?

You don't probably have any in your backyard in Wisconsin.

- That's a long story, but I'll try to keep it short.

I guess I've always been fascinated with big cats.

Lions and tigers and leopards and cheetahs and jaguars.

It was 1991, and I was living above Boulder, Colorado, in a tiny little mountain town of 200 people called Jamestown.

And I was going to graduate school, and I read Alan Rabinowitz's book Jaguar, and I was bowled over.

I thought, this is-- I loved where I lived, I loved my program, but all I wanted to do was light out for the territory, head to Central America, South America, and track jaguars.

- Spoiler alert.

[both laugh] - Yes.

- Did you actually see one finally?

- Well, I eventually did that.

So, fortunately, the fascination never diminished, my fascination with jaguars.

And yes, I finally got to see a jaguar.

I think the first one I saw was in 2021, in the Brazilian Pantanal, and it was one of the great experiences of my life.

– Norman: How long had you been looking for jaguars up to that point?

[James laughs] - James: About four and a half years total.

I was looking for jaguars, and in my maybe fourth year, the beginning of my fourth year, the end of the third year, I finally laid my eyes on a jaguar.

- That takes a lot of patience.

I'm gonna say a lot of sweat too.

- Yeah, yeah.

Well, I traveled the length of the jaguar corridor, and, you know, from the southern mountains of Arizona called the Madrean Sky Islands down to southern Bolivia, Brazil, et cetera.

And yeah, it was a marvelous experience.

But I did do a lot of sweating in the jungles as we tracked the jaguars.

- I'm kind of reminded of the pictures of Theodore Roosevelt when he emerged from the Amazon, what, 50 pounds lighter than when he went in.

- Yeah, I did too.

- Did you?

- Yeah, it's a good place to lose weight, yeah.

Roosevelt also tracked jaguars in the Brazilian Pantanal with his son, Kermit.

- What was the range, then, if we're talking about 1895 or 1900, 1905, let's say somewhere in there.

What was the range then compared to now?

Do you have a sense of that?

- Well, the range has certainly shrunk.

I mean, jaguars used to be part of the American landscape from Colorado to California to West Texas and Missouri to Alabama.

But in probably the mid 1800s, as we introduced cattle to the West, predator hunters, you know, shot them on sight as they did wolves and bears, et cetera.

So, the vast multitudes that once inhabited, you know, the American West, the vast multitudes of predators were eliminated in what has been called, you know, a war of extermination.

But now, the jaguar can still be found in southern Arizona.

In fact, we do have a jaguar wandering the mountains of the Sky Islands named Cochise, but the jaguar range goes from southern Arizona down to northern Argentina, a place called the Iber.

And that's 5,000 latitudinal miles.

So, that's a very, very big range.

- One of the things you point out in the book, which I found quite fascinating, I guess it took a while to discover it too, was that these jaguars are-- It's all the same gene pool.

I mean, it's all, they're all closely related despite all those thousands of miles of separation.

- That's the really kind of miraculous thing.

And that wasn't discovered until the late '90s or early 2000s.

They discovered that the jaguar was the only wide-ranging predator without a subspecies, which means, you know, across the entire jaguar range, they had the same DNA.

And so when they-- when Alan Rabinowitz, the man that I also wrote about, you know, the world's leading big cat man, jaguar man, first understood this when he was thinking about how to manage the jaguar corridor, he had to manage it as a single ecological unit.

You know, he had to encourage free gene flow from Argentina to southern Arizona, and that had never been done before.

- It's one thing to encourage the jaguar, but how continuous is that corridor from Argentina all the way up to the southwest U.S.?

- Well, the jaguar has been a huge success story, but the jaguar range has shrunk in the last 50 years to, like, 50% of the original range.

So, we're still fighting, you know, to protect what they call the jaguar conservation units.

Those are the jaguar strongholds as well as the corridors that unite those jaguar conservation units, and Alan Rabinowitz looked at it as kind of a circulatory system.

The jaguar strongholds were the heart and the jaguar corridors were the arteries and the veins.

- Why do people kill jaguars?

- Well, for a long time, they had a reputation as kind of cowardly cattle killers.

And that was the biggest reason, protecting the cattle herd.

But there are many, many different ways to protect the cattle in jaguar country.

And these have been experimented with in Brazil and Costa Rica, throughout Latin America, by using guard animals, by using night enclosures, by using electric fences.

But the cattle really isn't part of the jaguar prey template.

The jaguar has a really wide-ranging appetite.

It has 85 different prey species, from frogs to deer to capybara.

But the jaguar is-- One of the jaguar biologists in Brazil told me killing a cow is like going to Burger King and eating a Whopper.

It's that easy for them.

- Well, yes, so I have to ask, Jim, does the jaguar actually relish the hunt, or would there be some disappointment if there's just a cow standing there defenseless in a field?

I mean, do they actually prefer something other than cows if they can get it?

- That's a really interesting question.

I've never been asked that, so I'll attempt to answer that.

I think usually what happens is old, kind of debilitated jaguars will take cattle, and of course, jaguars in the prime of their lives will take cattle, but they prefer-- In fact, Teddy Roosevelt is the one who identified that.

He said they prefer wild species.

- Let's go back for a second and look at the very first jaguar that you saw.

- Yeah.

- All right.

Tell us about this jaguar.

– James: So, that's a jaguar named Aju.

And I was in the Brazilian Pantanal.

We were on a boat with maybe six people.

And the Brazilian captain, we were going down the Cuiab River, and we'd spent a good portion of the day looking for jaguars.

And I had kind of accepted the notion that I wasn't gonna see a jaguar and I was about to leave Brazil, and I may never see a jaguar.

And all of a sudden, we were going down the Cuiab River and the boat slowed, and I looked over to my left, and there was this big, beautiful jaguar laying in the sand underneath this tree.

And the boat captain cut the motor.

And then he turned and he said, "Ona."

And that's what they call the jaguar in Brazil, ona.

He whispered it, "Ona."

He stalled the boat, and then he put the anchor down, and we were about 40 feet off the bank, and we were watching the jaguar for maybe half an hour.

– Norman: He didn't seem too concerned about you?

- Completely unconcerned.

So, just, he didn't have a care in the world.

And then all of a sudden, he rose.

And when he rose, it was like this beautiful kind of concert, this beautiful, like, the musicality with which he moved was just amazing to me.

I mean, you know, a dog gets up and, you know, they're flopping all around.

But this jaguar moved so gracefully and fluidly.

And then he came down to the river and he drank, and he was drinking it, and his eyes were looking at us the whole time, but he still appeared unconcerned.

And then, he walked off like that.

And just this big, powerful animal.

You can see the musculature, you know, how powerful they are in the haunches and chest.

And that was the first jaguar I ever saw.

And it's, you know, an indelible image.

- I'm gonna gather that people are not one of those 85 species that they would like to eat.

- Well, that's a great question, because we may encounter-- People may encounter jaguars in southern Arizona one day.

Who knows?

No, they're not part of their prey template.

And also, the jaguars, there was this period called the tigrilladas, the jaguar craze.

And when jaguars across the United States, across Central and South America were shot on sight from the early '60s to the early '70s.

And just like, say, with the grizzly bears, they became-- The jaguars that survived and perpetuated their genes were the jaguars that were very elusive and solitary and stayed away from man.

So, like-- - So, we've kind of bred the aggression out of them to some extent.

- We've bred the aggression-- Well, they're aggressive animals.

I mean, they hunt aggressively.

They're the most, one of the most efficient hunters in the animal world.

But Starker Leopold, who studied jaguars in northern Mexico, said there are very, very few, almost no accounts of unprovoked attacks by jaguars.

- Now, there are two people who really seem to be the linchpins of your experience, your interest, your study of jaguars, Alan Rabinowitz and Harold Quigley.

So, how did you encounter them and what did you learn from them?

- So, Alan Rabinowitz, I read his book in 1991, and he was the world's leading big cat biologist.

He said he had to become part jaguar to study the jaguar, but he was this-- He had a lot in common with the jaguar.

He was this fierce, fearless, kind of iron-willed, indomitable man.

And he committed himself to protecting jaguars across the world.

As a boy, he had a horrible stutter.

He could barely get a word out, and he was ridiculed and ostracized and persecuted, just like the jaguar.

He said, "The jaguar, I have a lot in common with the jaguar."

And particularly during what I mentioned, the tigrilladas, when 180-- In a 12-year period, 180,000 jaguars were killed in Brazil alone.

So, he knew that the jaguar was persecuted and he wanted to be their voice.

- This mass killing all of a sudden, was that because suddenly they became fashionable or there were just unfounded rumors about them?

- So, jaguars had been killed, as I said, as cowardly cattle killers and their pelts trafficked, their teeth trafficked.

But the tigrilladas, the jaguar craze was set off by Jackie Kennedy.

[Norman laughs] She stepped out of a limousine on a tour of India and Pakistan in her-- And she had a designer, Oleg Cassini, and she was wearing a double-breasted, knee-length Somali leopard coat.

But what that set off was this-- 'Cause everybody wanted the Jackie look, right?

Everybody wanted to look like, you know, she was the trendsetter.

So, everybody in the world, certainly across North and South America, wanted a spotted leopard coat or some accessory.

So, people started providing the fashion industry with jaguars and ocelots, you know, as well as leopards from Africa.

And it was called the jaguar craze.

And Alan Rabinowitz said every jaguar had a dollar sign on its back right next to the bullseye.

[laughs] - I have to ask, then, about their reproductive capacity.

Were they capable of recovering from that kind of dent in their population?

- Well, that's part of the problem with the jaguar.

It has a very slow reproductive rate.

They have maybe one kitten every two years.

They have a long gestation period, over 100 days, and a long post-weaning period.

So, the jaguar cubs will stay with the mother 'til about two years.

And often, jaguars do not make it.

There's a high mortality before, particularly in the early years, one to three.

So, jaguars reproductively unlike, say, the coyote, you know, they have a very difficult time reproducing.

- It was too bad that Jackie wasn't wearing a really stylish wool coat.

– James: Yeah, that's right.

- Would have changed a lot of things.

Was there fairly quickly a move-- I know there was a few years later having to do with seal pups... - Uh-huh.

- ...and getting out the word that, you know, this is doing a great deal of harm to the seal population to make the fur fashionable.

– James: Yeah.

- And I suppose we almost ran out of beavers in North America back in the 17th, 18th, 19th century when they were popular.

- Same story, yeah.

- But was there actually a kind of a reaction, a perceptive reaction, perceptible reaction to this sudden mass slaying of tens of thousands of jaguars?

- Well, Oleg Cassini later in his life deeply regretted the coat he, you know, designed for Jackie Kennedy.

But there is something called CITES, and not to get too esoteric, but it's the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, and that stepped in in 1975 to protect the jaguar.

Its highest rating.

And that's the only weapon against-- was the only weapon against jaguar trading at the time, or the trade of wildlife in general.

So, that slowed the international trade.

There were still domestic trade, but that slowed the international trade and allowed the jaguar to slowly recover.

- Was poaching still a problem, though, in the time of Alan Rabinowitz and Quigley?

- Oh, yeah.

So, he studied in the Brazilian Pantanal to begin with.

And then he went to Belize, where-- This is the Brazilian Pantanal, a beautiful picture of the Cuiab River, where I was.

But Alan Rabinowitz spent two years in Belize with the New York Zoological Association, which became the Wildlife Conservation Society.

And he amassed the first kind of intimate and thorough study of the jaguar ever recorded.

So, he tracked jaguars, he was tracked by them, and he captured and collared jaguars.

And so, this is a photo-- I'll speak to this one just because it's kind of funny.

Alan Rabinowitz was a weightlifter and a martial arts expert, and he was a fitness fanatic.

And this is in Belize, in the Cockscomb Basin of Belize.

He found a little shack, a derelict shack outside this tiny Maya village, and he would go out to the yard.

He brought his barbells with him, and he would go out to the yard and take off his shirt, and he would lift, and all the Maya would gather around to watch him.

This man who was grunting and groaning and had the hairy chest of a wild animal and the green eyes of a jaguar, and they didn't know what to make of him.

But over the course of two years, they befriended him, and he came to care about them very, very deeply.

- I got the impression from your book that after a while, they thought he was a little demented.

- Well, Alan Rabinowitz admitted in his book Jaguar that he was dangerously close to the edge.

By the second year of his study, he was suffering both physically and mentally.

He had amoebic dysentery.

He had intestinal hookworm.

He'd barely survived a plane crash.

He had horrible headaches.

And emotionally, he was even on less stable ground.

And I say in the book, he was like a modern-day Captain Kurtz, swapping Belize for the Congo, and the local Maya-- - He went native, and then some.

- He went native.

Yeah, he went native and more.

And he admitted that, that, you know, Cockscomb became his only world.

But the Maya thought he was being pursued by evil spirits.

- Now, he had to still go back and raise money from time to time.

What, put on the coat and tie and talk to prospective contributors to this cause?

How did that work?

- Yeah.

Well, he-- So, his first opportunity, and he'd been hoping for an opportunity to talk about Cockscomb Basin and its jaguars.

He received an invitation from the prime minister of Belize and his cabinet to deliver a lecture.

So, when he received the invitation, at first he almost turned it down because he was terrified.

He still had a semi-pronounced stutter and he was terrified of stuttering in public.

Yeah, he was embarrassed of it.

So, what he did, he accepted the invitation and he went back to his shack and he had a little cracked piece of mirror, and he stood in front of it and he worked on his speech.

So, then when he went to Belize City, when the time came, he bought himself a suit so he looked respectable.

And he began his lecture using a jaguar call, a hollowed out kind of urn or gourd, hollowed out, dried out.

And the prime minister of Belize, John Cadle Price, or Smith, was thrilled with it.

And-- - Great icebreaker.

- Wonderful icebreaker.

And about halfway through, the prime minister elbowed his minister of the environment.

And he said, "You make sure you preserve the Cockscomb Basin."

And it became the Cockscomb Basin Jaguar Preserve when Alan Rabinowitz left in December of 1984.

- So, part of it was showbiz.

- Yeah, and he was a natural storyteller.

He knew how to tell a story, he had the timing.

And slowly, he overcame not only his stutter, but his kind of fear of speaking publicly.

And he became a wonderful public speaker.

- Back to some more jaguar images.

– James: Uh-huh.

- And, well, my first question would be, are there actually pictures of a jaguar consummating a hunt?

- Yeah.

- And my next then would be, they often, at least in the pictures we have, look so relaxed.

[James laughs] - James: Well, they spend much of their day hunting.

They say that jaguars have these sensory superpowers, these perceptual abilities that many less complex animals don't have.

And they need it because they have 85 prey species.

So, they have to process a lot of signals, a lot of clues, a lot of stimuli.

So, when they're hunting, they are, you know, dialed in.

But when they're relaxing, they're lying in trees.

And they're wonderful tree climbers.

In fact, there's an area in Brazil that's flooded for three months of the year.

And the jaguars spend 75% of their life in the trees.

Yeah.

- I should also ask, just pro forma, if you're suddenly confronting a jaguar face to face, what's your best plan?

- Don't turn your back.

[both laugh] Alexander von Humboldt, the German zoologist, I think he said that, he wrote that one thing he heard from the natives was never, ever turn your back on a jaguar.

There's a man in Brazil, and I mentioned his name.

His name is Rafael Hoogesteijn.

And he wrote the first book called The Jaguar or Jaguar in the late '80s.

The first real study of jaguars in Venezuela.

But he has been bluff charged by jaguars.

- You'll have to explain that.

- Yeah, so just like a bear, you know, they will bluff charge you just like a bear.

I've been bluff charged by a grizzly.

It's a terrifying thing.

But he held his ground, and he's this big, big man.

He's about 6'4" with a big laugh and a big personality, and he's held his ground.

And he's seen, I think, sixty jaguars while walking on foot in his lifetime.

And, you know, it's a frightening thing.

But don't act frightened.

- Jaguar not making any effort at concealment here.

What's the context?

– James: Yeah.

This is a photo that my friend Joares May took.

And Joares May is a wildlife veterinarian from Brazil.

He's also captured and collared more than 100 jaguars in his career.

In fact, he had to do one for 60 Minutes.

The whole 60 Minutes crew was down there, and Alan Rabinowitz was there and Howard Quigley and Joares, and this was one of his, I think, one of his first times trapping and collaring a jaguar, and he successfully captured and collared a jaguar for 60 Minutes.

- With a 60 Minutes crew there.

- There was the 60 Minutes crew there.

Talk about pressure.

- It doesn't take a village in that case, but if you've got one with you, you've got to work with it.

- Yeah, that's exactly right.

He's also captured maned wolves and ocelots and, yeah, a variety of different animals.

– Norman: Now, this is one standing over a kill.

– James: A caiman.

– Norman: A caiman.

– James: Yes.

This photo was taken by Sebastian Kennerknecht, who is maybe the world's leading big cat photographer.

And I met him down in the Brazilian Pantanal.

And he'd just gotten back from photographing snow leopards in the Himalayas or "Him-al-iyas."

And he took he took this amazing photo.

So, in Brazil, in the Pantanal, there are hundreds of thousands of caiman, and... - And they do reproduce quickly.

- They do reproduce very, very quickly.

And they are a delicacy for the-- or maybe a staple of the jaguar's, you know, meal.

And they often kill caiman.

- That would be quite a sight, though, to see.

- It's quite a sight.

- A fight.

- I've never seen one, but the people who have seen one, they'll dive-- A jaguar will dive from the bank of the river onto the back of the caiman.

And much of the fight will occur underneath the water.

And usually, the jaguar wins.

– Norman: That's phenomenal.

- Yeah.

– Norman: And this one seems to be actually looking back at the photographer and wondering what's going on.

– James: Kind of curiously, yeah.

I'm not sure about the origin of this photo, but that's another one taken by Joares May.

One thing I should say about the hunting and killing of caiman is the jaguar has the strongest bite of all the big cats.

In fact, 1,500 pounds per square inch.

They kill by strength and precision, so they, unlike most other cats that kill through strangulation, they kill-- They bite the back of the head, they penetrate the cranium, so half an inch of bone, into the brain stem.

And that's how they kill.

And the only animals in the world with a greater bite compression than the jaguar is the alligator, the crocodile, and the hippopotamus.

- But not the caiman.

- But not the caiman.

Right.

[both laugh] - And if we're stalking one, this is what we'd expect to see?

– James: Yeah, this was a photo taken by a friend of mine, Ezra Garfield.

Ezra is a young man that I've known for quite some time.

He was studying orcas in the Puget Sound, and I invited him to join me in Bolivia, in part because he's fluent in Spanish.

And my Spanish is kind of rough.

And anyway, that's a photo he took of a jaguar paw, which is very different than a puma paw, or slightly different than a puma paw.

It's wider.

And the toe, the pug is wider and the toes are wider.

- If a person, a scientist wants to study a jaguar, the best way is to catch one alive.

How do you go about doing that?

- So, this is-- I'm helping here.

I'm helping Joares May.

They do it with a cable snare.

So, what we did is there's a base plate.

We were driving pieces of rebar two feet into the ground so that when the jaguar put its foot in the cable snare, it couldn't pull the trap out of the ground.

So, this is Joares May, and this is for a capturing collaring effort that I participated in in Brazil, in the Pantanal.

And we ultimately did capture and collar a cat, which was one of the great experiences of my life.

- Is this one of those situations where you just, what, come out the next morning to see what you've got?

- So, what they have is they have a transmitter which is attached to the cable snare by a piece of fishing line.

They have a magnet on the bottom of the transmitter.

So, when the jaguar steps into the cable snare and puts his foot on the pressure plate, which is just a little sponge on the other side of the cable snare covered with dirt.

So, when the jaguar does that and then pulls its paw back, it trips that fishing line, the magnet comes off, and the transmitter is, transmits a message to the receiver.

And we spend on a jaguar, when we're capturing and collaring jaguars, you have everybody-- you check the-- you check the receiver once an hour.

So, you're up all night long.

But it's an exciting time.

And we had a week-long capture and collaring program.

And on the last night, we caught a female cat.

- What do you use for bait?

- Nothing.

That's-- - Truly?

- Yeah, well, we-- Well, in this case, usually they don't use bait, but because they were very eager to trap, particularly a female cat, there was a dead cow on the ranch, on the Panthera ranch in the Pantanal that they used as an attractor.

[both laugh] - So to speak.

- Right.

- Depending upon what you like.

- Yeah, and it did attract a very, very small female jaguar named Sophia, which we captured on the last night of the project.

- And then you put some kind of a transmitter on Sophia and her fellow cats and send them back out into the jungle.

- Yeah, and then send them back out.

It's a tiny little collar that weighs almost nothing that doesn't interfere with their hunting or their movements.

The protocol is so strict and rigid for capturing jaguars, and they follow it.

It's like a sacred act.

And, yeah, so you send the jaguar back out, and then you yield all this information about its range, what it's eating, when it's eating, when it's sleeping.

And then, after a year and a half or two years, it just falls off.

- Do you ever just kind of lose track of one?

You don't know why you're not getting the transmissions anymore?

- Yeah, well, if you're not getting the transmission anymore, then something's happened.

- It lost to the caiman that time or something.

- Sometimes, the caiman wins.

Yeah, right.

- Let's look at the topography of some of these places.

I think you mentioned Belize, for one, as being one of those hearts, system of hearts and corridors.

– James: Yeah.

– Norman: And jungle.

– James: Oh, yeah, jungle and mountains.

And this is where Alan Rabinowitz, from March of 1983 to December of 1984, tracked jaguars.

And these mountains are loaded with the snake fer-de-lance, which is one of the most... - Deadly poisonous.

- ...most deadly snakes in the world.

And so, he was extremely fearful of these snakes.

So, it's a very dangerous place to track jaguars.

But, you know, that's where he was for a year and a half.

- Do you ever have a problem when you're actually trying to track a jaguar with other animals?

My first thought would be buzzards, but we hope that doesn't happen.

But kind of tipping off your presence.

Birds in particular?

- Well, if you're trapping jaguars-- At that time, he wasn't using cable snares.

He was using actually traps that he had fashioned.

That's a good question.

I'm not sure about that.

Since there's no bait, you really-- usually no bait.

Unlike, you know-- So, I don't think that you would attract buzzards or vultures or other, you know, animals looking for carrion.

- You did see, I gather, quite a variety of birds, though.

- Oh, magnificent.

- A couple of the people looking for jaguars got very excited about dozens, scores of species of birds.

- Yeah, my friend Ezra Garfield is a birder.

I am not a birder.

But on this trip to Bolivia, we were about four hours north of Santa Cruz.

I think in four days, he added 120 birds to his life list, so he was ecstatic.

[both laugh] We didn't see a jaguar on that.

We saw jaguar tracks, we saw an ocelot, we saw a jaguarundi, but no jaguar.

But he saw many, many birds.

- Let's get into the personalities a little bit of some of the jaguars.

There's one that you called El Jefe, which is a great word for this gorgeous creature.

- Oh, boy.

Yeah, El Jefe was the celebrity cat that roamed southern Arizona.

This is a photo of me in the Sky Islands of southern Arizona.

I was backpacking in El Jefe country.

El Jefe was a jaguar that achieved celebrity status in southern Arizona.

He was there for four years, so he came-- There's the Northern Jaguar Reserve in northern Mexico in the Sierra Madres, which is about 120 miles south of the border.

So, he was a young adolescent jaguar, and they're prowlers, they're roamers, they wander.

And he wandered into southern Arizona.

And as I said, he was there for four years.

He was captured on camera traps or trail cams.

And in 2016, in February 2 of 2016, the video was released of El Jefe, and 21 million people in the United States saw it, 100 million people across the world.

It was aired on seven continents.

And he was the great, you know, celebrity jaguar of Arizona.

– Norman: And then what?

– James: And then, he went-- He realized, this adolescent jaguar, that he was reproductively doomed in southern Arizona.

So, he crossed back over the border into northern Mexico, where he had a better chance of procreating.

- How has the wall, the border wall affected traffic north and south for jaguars?

- Considerably.

There was hope on the part of many wildlife biologists that jaguars, in part because of global warming, were moving north, kind of recolonizing or repopulating areas where they had lived historically.

And southern Arizona was one of those places.

But now, and I spent a lot of time along the wall.

The wall is 30 feet high.

They're called bollards.

And at the top, there are anti-climbing gates, but they're impenetrable.

And they've put in these little cat gates, these, you know, cat doors or jaguar doors.

- Sure.

- But they're too small for a jaguar.

In fact, there was a cartoon, I think in the Arizona Daily Star, where a jaguar was caught halfway between the United States and Mexico.

And he says to himself, "I shouldn't have eaten that last armadillo."

And then there's a coati saying, "Oh, great jaguar, welcome to the U.S.A."

And then there's a frog or a toad alongside the coati that says, "Do we need some Crisco?"

- To get you through the gate.

- To get you through the gate.

But no, it will-- Most biologists, many biologists think that it will end the historic migration of species.

And unless underpasses are built or overpasses are built-- - It would be something that a person could go through, though.

- Yeah, right.

And frankly, the wall, eventually, they're gonna build a virtual wall with towers and the wall will be redundant.

The physical wall will be redundant.

It will be unnecessary.

- Sooner rather than later, I'm guessing.

- Yeah, sooner rather than later.

But as we know, I mean, the intent is to still build a wall.

– Norman: But if it were an e-wall, let's call it, then this would not interfere with the migration.

- It'd be a very, very different thing.

And they can, you know, they can-- The e-wall, you know, with their towers, they can, you know, detect a salamander walking across the sand at midnight.

- You had, and still do have to, in this conservation effort to preserve the corridor.

South-north corridor for jaguars.

You must have had to-- And, of course, the people you worked with, Rabinowitz and Quigley, for example, have had to work with a lot of ranchers in various ways in various parts of South America and Central America.

– James: Yeah, and the ranchers, you know, some ranchers, of course, are vehemently opposed to the jaguar or the introduction of the jaguar.

But throughout the jaguar corridor, there are a lot of groups working with ranchers to help them kind of manage their herds so that they aren't desirable to jaguars, and they've had a lot of success.

- I would think certain perfumes, for example.

[both laugh] - Yeah, maybe.

- Would be off-putting.

- Or guard animals.

At one of the ranches, and this is one of the ranches I visited in Belize.

This is called the San Miguelito Jaguar Ranch, which is a working cattle ranch.

But they manage their herd very kind of intensely or intently, and they use guard animals.

And one of the guard animals they use is a water buffalo.

– Norman: A water buffalo?

- A water buffalo, yeah.

Which also gives great cream.

And so, the water-- So it's, you know, it's something that also provides them with income.

But the water buffalo protect the cattle from the jaguar.

But throughout the United States, northern Mexico and the United States, they're working with ranchers to accept jaguars.

There's a program in northern Mexico called Viviendo Con Felinos.

– Norman: Living with the cats.

- Yeah, right.

And they pay ranchers to photograph jaguars and ocelots instead of shooting them.

So, they'll pay 'em 5,000 pesos to shoot a photo, to take a photo of a jaguar.

So, many of the ranchers are now proud of the jaguars that are roaming their ranches, or the ocelots that are roaming their ranches.

- And so, that outweighs whatever loss they would have of cattle, or between the water buffalo and other precautions, it actually, they come out ahead?

- Yeah, well, that's a good question.

There's also a depredation fund.

So, there's a depredation fund that will pay ranchers essentially what they could get, you know, by selling a cow.

They will reimburse the rancher.

And that's also been very, very effective.

- Now, I know that kind of thing has been done, say, in Wisconsin with wolves, for example.

And so, there's some experience with that.

– James: Yeah.

- Some precedent for it.

And that actually works, you're saying, in terms of jaguars?

– James: Yeah, yeah, it does work.

Again, there are ranchers who will never accept jaguars, say, in southern Arizona, or there are deer hunters or elk hunters who will never accept jaguars, but they live in low densities.

And they do have-- They are very adaptable and they do enjoy a lot of other prey species outside of cattle or apart from cattle.

- Now, back at the beginning, I asked why would people kill a jaguar.

And there are some deeply held traditional reasons that actually pay homage to the jaguar, right?

So, how do you work around that?

- Well, yeah.

That's another-- That's a great question.

Well, I mean, historically in Central and South America, metaphysically, there's no more important animal to the people of Central and South America.

Throughout millennia, the jaguar was worshipped.

The Maya believed that there was a jaguar protector that accompanied the Sun on its journey from day to night and back to day.

There's the Olmecs of southern Mexico believed that their ruling, the people ruling their civilization had descended from jaguars.

But yes, there was jaguar sacrifice to the gods.

That, of course, that was, that did happen.

But it was, I'm not sure if worshipful is the word, but they didn't, there weren't cattle at that point.

The real killing of the jaguar happened when man came to the New World and brought with him his cattle.

- And were there other cats historically in North-- in the Americas, going back to, you know, 20,000 years or whatever distance?

- Yeah, there were a lot of cats.

There was the, there were scimitar cats, there were American lions, there were false cheetahs.

There were lots of cats, along with dire wolves and long-legged hyenas.

But when early man came into North America with his obsidian- or chert-tipped spears and killed off the megafauna that they, you know, the big ungulates, the big-- that they were eating, you know, that they depended on, those animals, all those other cats fell off the precipice of extinction.

But the jaguar, because of its resilience and adaptability, was able to reshape itself.

It became much smaller and it became much less dependent on those mega grazers.

And it varied its diet.

It embraced a lot of other species as a lot of other prey species.

- And well, as you mentioned earlier, Jim, also, the jaguar modified its behavior, if we're reading things right, in terms of the less aggressive ones were the ones that didn't-- or the more aggressive ones were the ones that didn't survive, and the ones that were more elusive were the survivors.

- That's a very good point, yeah.

I think that Alan Rabinowitz called it a superior evolutionary strategy to be a reluctant warrior, to be elusive and quiet and solitary and cryptic.

- There's a lot to be said for a retreat?

- Yeah, that's exactly right, for a retreat.

- Big picture though, if we come back to present time and this whole effort to somehow reestablish the corridors and the strongholds for the jaguar, and we look at Rabinowitz and Quigley and others over the course of, what, 40, 50 years in terms of their work?

- Yeah.

- What kind of progress do we actually see?

- Well, they just had a-- there was just a meeting in Mexico City of all kinds of wildlife biologists, from a variety, from dozens of different environmental organizations.

And there's something called the 2030 road map.

So, there's an effort-- First of all, all of Latin America embraced the jaguar as its emblematic species.

So, that was something that was never done before, and that showed a real kind of commitment to preserving the jaguar.

And the 2030 road map hopes to connect 30 jaguar strongholds, jaguar conservation units, the areas where there are a lot of jaguars, by 2030, and they hope to secure 30 more jaguar strongholds by 2030.

So, there's a real, real effort to kind of build and fortify and strengthen the jaguar corridor.

But at the same time, there is industrial agriculture.

There are huge Chinese-funded infrastructure programs.

– Norman: That's a whole phenomenon in its own right.

- Yeah, exactly.

- We see jaguar loss around these economic incentive areas that the Chinese have established in the Americas.

- That's exactly right.

As part of their Belt and Road program.

Now there is a discernible trafficking route between Central and South America and China.

And it's been identified, and it's run by the same people that move drugs, that move people, that move timber, you know, same people, same trafficking routes.

And then, as I said, there's industrial agriculture.

You think that we have a lot of soybeans, say, in central Illinois or western Minnesota?

You haven't seen soybeans until you go to Bolivia and Brazil.

- On formerly forested land.

- On formerly forested land.

So, you have the arc of deforestation encroaching on the Amazon, which is habitat for probably 70% of the jaguars in the world.

And then, you have this ghastly trade, international trade in jaguar parts.

Now there's something in China.

They're moving from tigers to jaguars, and they're wearing jaguar claws and jaguar teeth as kind of-- - Status symbols?

- Yes, exactly.

Status symbols, symbols of power and prestige and sophistication.

And I don't mean-- I mean, there is a lot of domestic trade, too, that China has nothing, no part in.

But there is definitely an international trade that even CITES is extremely worried about.

- And has big money at the other end of it.

- Yeah, very big money.

It's like the ivory trade in Africa initially was.

It was a haphazard trade, and then it became a multi, multibillion-dollar trade.

Not that that's gonna happen to jaguars, but there is the worry that, you know, that this trade is gearing up.

- In the Department of Habitat too, there's also this, what is it called, the Maya railroad?

- Oh, the Tren Maya, yeah.

Tren Maya is a railroad that they-- that now runs through Mexico's Yucatn for 960 miles.

And it's one of the great infrastructure projects that big cat biologists fear.

And I was there, I saw it.

There's a 150-yard right of way, and they just clear, you know-- - 150 yards across?

- Across, and they clear, you know, rainforest.

But, at the same time, there's a great thing going on down there.

The Selva Maya Forest, they've just preserved, between Mexico, Belize, and Guatemala, 12 million acres of rainforest.

So, you have these, you have these combating or, you know, counter movements and, you know, conservation is that way, I guess.

As I hear from conservation, it's one step forward and one step back or one step back and one step forward.

- Well, we hope it's two steps forward and one back if it's got to be one or the other.

But... - Yeah.

- And how do the governments of some of these countries play into this?

I mean, are there players and non-players when we look at these efforts for conservation and restoration?

- Yeah, well, I mean, there are supporters, but that was one of the great things that came out of this recent meeting that I didn't attend.

The conference in Mexico City.

Is of the 15 jaguar-range countries, all of them, including El Salvador and Uruguay, which don't have jaguars anymore, they've been eliminated, pledged, you know, their dedication to preserving the jaguar corridor and preserving whatever jaguars, you know, live in those countries.

- If we imagine that the jaguar, like we say of humans, came across the land bridge, is that the theory?

- Yeah, came across the land bridge a million years ago and encountered monumental shields of ice and, you know, waited its time for many, many, many, many generations, and then slowly roamed down into Canada.

Some took an interior path, some took a path along the coast, just like, you know, early man did.

But, you know, they preceded early man.

And they came into the grasslands of Montana and the Dakotas and Kansas, and then they slowly moved down all the way to, you know, northern Argentina.

- Why do you suppose that the bulk of them then were eventually from the-- Well, I'm gonna say mostly the southern U.S.

down into South America?

Why, in other words, why did they leave Canada?

Why did they leave the northern part of North America?

- Yeah, that's a really good question.

I think they migrated south.

And then as I understand it, they started moving back north.

And by the time they moved back north, there were, you know, very talented hunters with unprecedented lethality, right, roaming, you know, the plains of the United States that still hadn't moved into Central and South America.

So, as far as I understand, that is probably what happened.

So, they concentrated in Central America and areas of South America.

- So, they had probably more cover down there and lower population density in terms of humans, and... - Yeah, I think so.

And that's why they became most associated with kind of humid rainforests when actually, they're generalists.

You know, they're the great cosmopolitan species.

In Bolivia, they can live in these, you know, the Chiquitano Forest, which looks almost like a desert.

And they thrive there.

And that's how adaptable they are.

And then they thrive in the Amazon or the Brazilian Pantanal, which is a completely different habitat.

- How do you feel about seeing jaguars in zoos?

- Well, in fact, the zoo in Milwaukee just got a jaguar, which is really interesting.

Alan Rabinowitz-- They call 'em the wildest of all the big cats.

That a jaguar-- You know, you sometimes see a tame tiger or a tame lion, but a jaguar-- - Sure, doing tricks.

- Yeah, right.

But a jaguar, they say, can never be tamed.

But if they're trying to preserve, you know, the species, if those zoos are attempting to preserve the species, then I think it's, you know, probably a good thing.

And I think that they're probably-- Speaking of very rigid protocols, there are probably very rigid protocols for, you know, for keeping those jaguars.

- And in a way, I suppose those jaguars, those captive jaguars are sort of goodwill ambassadors.

- Perhaps, yeah, I think that's, yeah, certainly one of the motivations.

- Well, James Campbell, I'm glad you saw your jaguar.

How many total have you seen?

- I think I've seen half a dozen.

- Well, that's not bad for how many years of work?

- About four years of work, which is pretty good.

I mean, a lot of the biologists that work in the rainforest do not see jaguars, so I feel lucky.

- Well, congratulations, and thanks for sharing your experiences with us.

– James: My pleasure.

- Gonna be fascinating to see what your next adventure is.

- [laughs] Who knows?

- We'll be looking for that.

- I hope it's something far afield again.

- I'm Norman Gilliland, and I hope you'll join me next time around for University Place Presents.

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