EnglishOn a recent trip to El Salvador with Paso Pacífico, I listened to a local farmer proudly naming the jaguar as a local species.
I didn’t like to contradict him, but the outside world says that nobody has seen one in decades, and jaguars are now officially extinct in El Salvador. Still, there are many cases where locally extinct species reappear after decades of being absent.
Though nature is resilient, at Paso Pacífico, we believe in taking action before that time comes so that we never have to say “they are all gone.”
The jaguar is an apex predator, threatened only by humans. In the early 1800s, the jaguar population ranged from the southern US to the tip of South America, and numbered around 400,000. Now, isolated pockets of jaguars total around 15,000 in Mexico, Central America, Brazil, Paraguay and Bolivia. We have managed to hunt them and destroy their habitat to the extent that they are in danger everywhere they live. Even though poaching jaguars is forbidden in most countries, the big cats are still killed by poachers.
The loss of habitat threatens jaguars most. Accustomed to roaming over huge areas to look for suitable mates, jaguars now can often interbreed only with their family members, weakening the gene pool and making the cats less healthy both physically and mentally. This leads to more dangerous behavior and more clashes with humans. There’s a good reason we don’t marry our close relatives!
In areas where human habitat has encroached on jaguar habitat, farmers often try to shoot big cats to protect their livestock. Jaguars will usually go after big prey, but as food sources shrink, they are forced to widen their diet. That invites new dangers, such as eating a dog with distemper and spreading the disease through the forest, or eating a rat which has been poisoned, or getting hit by cars on newly-built roads.
Paso Pacífico is trying to create wildlife corridors which are basically strips of land between jaguar habitats where development is banned or restricted so that the areas can remain suitable habitat for jaguars and their prey. This also prevents rodent populations from exploding and protects the biodiversity. We have also helped establish programs to encourage farmers to corral their animals and compensate them for livestock lost to jaguars. Our Junior Ranger programs have educated children about the value of preserving their environment and trained them to record signs of jaguars and operate camera traps.
These links will tell you more about our projects to protect jaguars. Interested? Please donate and get involved.