A female jaguar stars into a camera-trap, while a male cub moves through an old oil palm plantation in the jaguar corridor of Colombia. (Esteban Payan/Panthera)
 
By Eric Niiler December 22
 

Growing up in New York, Alan Rabinowitz spent hours gazing at the tigers, lions, jaguars and leopards at the Bronx Zoo. His father thought the visits would help his stuttering condition, with the Lion House a safe place to let him express himself to the animals that so entranced him. It did that, but the visits also led him to a lifelong passion for big cats.

A jaguar track is found during a ground-truthing survey along the northern coast of Honduras. (Steve Winter/Panthera)
 
 After earning a PhD in wildlife ecology, Rabinowitz has become one of the world’s experts on the animals. In the 1990s, he helped establish a jaguar preserve in Belize — the spotted cat lives in Central and South America — and today Rabinowitz, 60, is chief executive of Panthera, a nonprofit conservation group that he helped found. His book, “An Indomitable Beast: The Remarkable Journey of the Jaguar,” looks at the animal’s evolution and recent history, its cultural influence on the Aztec and Maya civilizations and the establishment of the Jaguar Corridor from Mexico to Argentina. The Post spoke with Rabinowitz recently.

I gather you’re not opposed to hunting to fund conservation?
Do I think there could be a place for sustainable hunting, and the benefits go back to conservation? Yes, I do. Tigers are on the edge. I spent 30 years trying to save tigers. If hunting can be done in a manner that doesn’t affect reproduction — you are not taking reproductive females, and you’re taking older animals — if there can be a valid means of showing that taking trophies in the hunt truly benefits the survival of the species or the ecosystem as a whole, then I could see my way to that. That’s the reality of the world.

You write about “jaguarness” in your book. What is that?
From being around them, I knew there was something special and different [about them]. They behave and look at you differently than other big cats. This concept of “jaguarness” is: How come jaguars are doing so much better than the other big cats? It’s not just luck. Jaguars never rush into something. The jaguar watches, waits and evaluates. Most of the time, it walks away. People have called the jaguar a coward. It can break the necks of three dogs at once, but it realizes that fighting is not a good survival technique unless you have to. [Jaguarness] is a combination of evolution, behavior, the jaguar’s anatomical structure.

One time you were followed by a jaguar in the jungle without knowing it.
It was toward the end of the work day [in Belize]. I saw a big, new male track, then I lost it. I kept on going, but it was getting dark and I realized that I couldn’t be caught out without a flashlight. I turned around, and the jaguar was in back of me. He circled around me and was about 25 feet away. I was shocked. I had never been that close to a non-drugged jaguar outside of a cage. It wasn’t aggressive. I walked toward him, thinking he would walk off. He stood there. I squatted and tried to appear non-threatening. The jaguar sat down, too, just looking at me. I wish I could have enjoyed the moment, but I was terrified. This 250-pound animal could kill me in a single leap. I could fight and there would be no way to overcome this beast. I stood up and stepped back. I knew not to run. Then I tripped and fell. He stood up, growled and walked [away from me] over to the edge of the forest. He looked back at me and disappeared. It was incredible. It confirmed my feelings, and those of many others that live with jaguars, that they do not want to harm people once they assess that there is no danger. Still, being faced with the Rocky of predators, knowing that there is no escape if he wishes to kill you, takes one’s breath away.
 

Jaguar expert Alan Rabinowitz helped found a preserve in Belize for the animals. (Steve Winter/Panthera)
 
What’s the biggest threat to the jaguar today?
Hunting, the loss of habitat and hunting of the jaguar’s prey. It’s down to 50 percent of [its original] habitat. [The loss of habitat] has been stabilized, but people are still killing jaguars. Killing jaguars as a sport is everywhere. That’s a real problem. Illegal hunting of jaguar’s food is done everywhere. Fortunately, the jaguar is adaptable. They have one of the most diverse and opportunistic diets of any of the big cats. With the strongest jaws, per pound of weight, of any of the big cats, these massively strong animals can take down a 2,000-pound bull and drag it into the forest. Sometimes they go after the 1,000-pound tapirs with whom they live. But one of their favorite, though not easy, prey are the peccaries, which roam in groups and can tear apart a jaguar with their knifelike tusks if they get riled enough. But jaguars love to eat them and they will follow a herd to try and pick off young ones or slackers. Often, however, jaguars survive on smaller prey — agoutis, armadillos, paca, coati mundi, small ground-dwelling birds and even sometimes snakes and iguana.

Jaguars are doing better than the other big cats elsewhere because they had a respite. During the Spanish and Portuguese colonization [of Central and South America in the 16th and 17th centuries], disease killed off 90 percent of the indigenous people. As a result, the forest grew back and the jaguars recolonized Central America from South America.

How many jaguars are left in the wild?
Not as many as 100,000, but more than 20,000. We are trying to figure out that number.

What is the Jaguar Corridor?
The Jaguar Corridor is a genetic corridor. In the late 1990s, we found that we could get DNA material from jaguar fecal matter. When [biologists] looked at the feces from Mexico and Argentina, we realized it was the same animal. It is connected genetically through its entire range. Then we said, “How could this be? It exists all the way from Mexico to Argentina, with the Panama Canal in between.” I knew that in order to preserve the Jaguar Corridor, there had to be some top-down official recognition of it. We wanted this corridor to be zoned, like other lands, so that this citrus grove or cattle plantation was part of the Jaguar Corridor [so the cat would be allowed to pass undisturbed]. We spent a decade . . . checking out the lands of the corridor, quadrant by quadrant. We put up camera traps and did surveys to get proof that they were using that area. Once we had that data, we went to the countries’ heads of state.
Why was that important?
The greatest hedge against extinction of any species is genetic diversity. You don’t want brothers and sisters marrying or royal families mixing, because inbreeding often leads to certain diseases. . . . With the Jaguar Corridor, we have mostly young males walking back and forth between areas. That’s enough to insert their DNA into another area so the diversity maintains itself from Mexico to Argentina. That’s a reason for the jaguar’s success.
Why do we need the jaguars? Lots of forest have lost their top predators or big cats and they still look good. But now we know beyond a doubt that removal of the top or apex predators like jaguars from a natural system changes that system irrevocably; it changes and weakens the stability of the environmental interactions. We are also now becoming more aware of the increase in reemerging infectious diseases — SARS, West Nile virus, Ebola, Lyme disease. Up to 75 percent of these diseases and all of the ones I just mentioned are zoonotic, meaning that they involve an animal host. Undisturbed natural systems act as firewalls for these diseases, keeping them in check. When that firewall is destabilized, the diseases cross over more easily into the human’s world.

The U.S. government recently declared a small area along the Mexican border endangered species habitat for the jaguar. Does that mean there are jaguars living in Arizona?
There is no evidence of any resident populations. Jaguars from northern Mexico are clearly trying to come over.They turn around and come back to Mexico or they get shot. They don’t establish themselves [in Arizona]. If no breeding population exists, it will be almost impossible for dispersing young males to establish a resident population.

Are you optimistic about their future?
Absolutely. The jaguar is one of the most successful, resilient and powerful big predators in the world. It has survived for approximately 4 million years, through major climatic changes during the ice ages of the Pleistocene, when most of the other large-bodied cats of the world went extinct. But since modern man, Homo sapiens, has come on the scene throughout the jaguar’s remaining range in the New World, human activities and land use are the major threat to this species’s existence.
The jaguars can adapt and survive climate change; they have done that many times before. But they must be allowed to move through the environment as they have done for millions of years. This is the essence of the Jaguar Corridor that I’ve been working on for nearly 15 years.

I believe in the resiliency of the jaguars, and as tough as it is, I believe in the intelligence of the human race. These animals are very necessary for the health and well-being of the rest of the jungle species as well. We are starting to understand that.

Fast facts about jaguars:
Type: Mammal
Diet: Carnivorous
Average life span in the wild: 12 to 15 years
Size: Head and body — 5 to 6 feet; Tail — 27.5 to 36 inches
Weight: 100 to 250 pounds
Protection status: Near-threatened

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