Across the Jaguar Corridor, people who came into contact with jaguars killed them with impunity.
From the plains of Kansas to El Jefe’s stomping grounds in the rugged borderland region of the United States and northern Mexico to the Colombian Amazon and the heat-baked Gran Chaco of southern Bolivia, Indigenous, precolonial people inhabited the same landscape as jaguars. They shared their world with them, feared them and worshipped them, incorporating the jaguar’s image into their architecture, art, iconography, mythology, and religion. Our relationship to the jaguar is an ancient, intimate, and mythic one, so durable, in fact, that for thousands of years the great carnivore achieved a consequential presence in the lives of many different peoples and cultures separated by thousands of miles. Metaphysically speaking, no animal was more important than the jaguar.*
A fascinating story of the movement to protect the jaguar, and the man who devoted his life to saving the species.
Many tribes of the Amazon inhabited a world where the boundary between humans and the animals of the rainforest blurred, and they developed a complex animism to account for that; no animal was more intrinsic to their beliefs than the jaguar. In the tropical lowlands of Bolivia, a Tsimane myth told of a tigre gente (jaguar people) who possessed the supernatural ability to shape-shift and transform into jaguars. Farther to the north the legendary Maya revered the jaguar. Because no other animal possessed its strength, stealth, and sense of caution, the Maya believed that the jaguar protected the sun on its journey from day to night and back to day. Farther north, in the desert Southwest of the United States, Pueblo lore told of the rohona, a “big cat with spots,” that was venerated as a spirit hunter to which the Pueblo prayed at tribal ceremonies.1
With the arrival of Europeans, jaguars came into close proximity with people. The colonists’ vulnerable livestock provided jaguars with ridiculously easy targets. Rafael Hoogesteijn, Latin America’s leading jaguar conflict specialist and an expert on livestock depredation and founder of Panthera Brasil, equated a jaguar taking a calf to humans eating at Burger King. It was as easy as buying a Whopper. But as simple as it was for a big cat to stalk and kill defenseless livestock, cattle killing never became endemic among jaguars. According to A. Starker Leopold, the zoologist and conservationist and son of Aldo Leopold who studied jaguars in northern Mexico, cattle killing was rare among jaguars and was confined to areas where they lacked available prey, or to big cats whose hunting skills had been compromised by injury. U.S. president Theodore Roosevelt also weighed in on behalf of the jaguar. Roosevelt, who hunted jaguars on horseback in the Brazilian Pantanal and developed a complicated but lasting respect for the big cat, claimed that jaguars didn’t bother with livestock because they preferred wild prey.2
In the United States, jaguars once inhabited a variety of ecosystems, from West Texas to Colorado and Missouri to Alabama. However, the first homesteaders, clinging to an irrational fear of the wild that cast predators as bloodthirsty killers, brutally disrupted an ecosystem that had thrived for 10,000 years.3 The mind-boggling number of animals that had flourished in the wake of the Pleistocene extinctions began to disappear. Predators vanished first. Half a million gray and red wolves and a hundred thousand grizzlies. Then other animals vanished—herds of bison that had once extended to the curve of the Earth, staggering numbers of pronghorns, wild horses, elk, and bighorn sheep.4 Soon much of the spectacular wilderness, with its “vast multitudes” of animals that John James Audubon praised so ecstatically during his trip through the West in the summer of 1843, was made safe for livestock.5 Dan Flores writes in American Serengeti that the American West became a veritable “slaughterhouse.”6 Animals were massacred in what he considers the “largest wholesale destruction of animal life… in modern history.” Although exact numbers are unattainable, the author Barry Lopez lamented the breathtaking and deliberate extirpation of 500 million animals.
Predator hunters from the U.S. Bureau of Biological Survey, whose mission changed from a purely scientific one to one of outright predator control, pursued coyotes, wolves, mountain lions, jaguars, and bears with a particular vengeance in what amounted to a war of extermination, driven by what Barry Lopez called “colonial indifference.” They were numb to the consequences of their actions. In fact, the agency’s merciless motto was to “bring them [predators] in no matter how.”7
The bureau even got into the business of manufacturing poison. It built a plant in Denver, which it named the Eradication Methods Laboratory, then authorized its predatory and rodent control hunters to set out millions of toxic bait stations, including horrendously cruel M-44 “cyanide bombs” that killed tens of thousands of targeted and unintended animals and subjected them to agonizing deaths.8 Private bounty hunters, state predator agents, stockmen, and even veterinarians contributed to the carnage. In Montana, veterinarians were required by law to infect captured wolves with mange in hopes that when they were released, the disease would spread like wildfire.
In 1917 the Arizona branch of the Bureau of Biological Survey, operating as an arm of the livestock industry, announced, with lethal intent, that “all Lobo wolves and jaguars will be taken as soon as they enter this State from Mexico and New Mexico, as 100 percent of them live on livestock and game.”9 In 1929 the State of Arizona classified jaguars as predators, meaning that anyone could kill them at any time. Eventually, apart from a small relict population that held on in the desert Southwest and in the rugged mountain forests of central Arizona and New Mexico, jaguars were almost eliminated from the United States.
The crusade went unchallenged until a meeting of the American Society of Mammalogists, a collection of biologists and naturalists that included Aldo Leopold, Olaus Murie, and Joseph Grinnell, cast doubt on the country’s policy of predator control—or more accurately, predator annihilation.10 Studies, they said, showed that contrary to popular belief, functioning ecosystems depended on predators. If predators were fulfilling their roles, ecosystems flourished; and if they weren’t, ecosystems suffered†. The Bureau of Biological Survey’s E. A. Goldman, a mammalogist who led the bureau’s big game and bird department, treated the message as a declaration of war, proclaiming, “Large predatory mammals, destructive to livestock and to game no longer have a place in our advancing civilization.”11
The hate wasn’t confined to the United States. Across the Jaguar Corridor, big game hunters, ranchers, farmers, and everyday people who came into contact with jaguars killed them with impunity. But it was nothing compared to the coming onslaught.
In 1962 Jacqueline Kennedy, the photogenic U.S. first lady, stepped out of a car and flashed her beguiling smile, and the world swooned. Having already charmed Charles de Gaulle, the French prime minister, and much of Europe with her beauty and grace—the French people shouted “ ‘Vive Jacqueline!” and the mass circulation France-Soir wrote ironically of “Jackie” and “the likeable young man accompanying her”—she was off on a goodwill tour of India and Pakistan.12 For the trip, Oleg Cassini, her official couturier, who had designed clothes for Hollywood movie stars, outfitted her in a $20,000 double-breasted, knee-length Somali leopard coat with six large black buttons, a black Bergdorf Goodman pillbox hat perched on her bouffant hairdo, and black elbow-length gloves. Cassini, a flamboyant and debonair ladies’ man, preferred the dramatic, but Jackie often insisted on a simple but elegant style appropriate for her role as the president’s wife. Nevertheless she exuded glamour, and as her fame reached dizzying heights, the “Jackie look,” as it would come to be called, swept America’s multibillion-dollar fashion industry and was copied by women across the globe. Few outfits, however, captivated people as much as her leopard coat, and the look spurred an international craze and a $30 million industry in exotic spotted-cat—mostly leopards, jaguars, and ocelots—coats and accessories. Cassini came to regret the fad he’d helped to start and became fervently anti-fur.13
Tens of thousands of hunters across Central and South America answered the call for the spotted pelts, tracking big cats unsparingly and with pathological dedication across jungles, canyons, and scrub forests. This period, built on the backs of dead jaguars, was known as the “jaguar craze,” the tigrilladas, in Latin America.14
The tigrilladas had a disastrous effect on jaguar populations. Between 1962 and 1975, an estimated 180,000 jaguars were killed in the Brazilian Amazon alone, a number that eclipses even the most aggressive estimates of today’s entire jaguar population.15 Across jaguar territory, people chased and stalked the big cat with the same ravenousness that Clovis hunters had pursued the North American mammoth. The beautiful jaguar seemed doomed by the deadly intersection of fashion and commerce. Because jaguars, like other large-bodied carnivores, have relatively slow reproductive rates, an average of only one cub every two years (and a fairly long gestation period of 100 days) and a protracted post-weaning period, the jaguar craze pushed the big cat to the precipice of extinction.
In 1975 the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) stepped in to save the jaguar, when it listed it under Appendix I, its highest level of protection, reserved for imperiled species in danger of extinction. Signed by nearly every country in the world, CITES is the primary weapon against wildlife trafficking. It was first proposed in 1963, and in the 12 long and deadly years that it took to implement the convention, hunters, eager to supply the seemingly insatiable fashion industry, continued their killing spree.
CITES is a nonbinding international agreement, lacking an enforcement mechanism, and from the very beginning, countries violated it. But whatever its drawbacks were (and are), CITES was the first meaningful attempt to protect endangered animals and plants. Before it existed, the international wildlife trade was a rapacious free-for-all of unrestricted killing and commerce. John Polisar, formerly of the Wildlife Conservation Society, has probably spent more time in the Jaguar Corridor than any biologist alive today and was a key member of Alan Rabinowitz’s Jaguar Corridor Initiative team in the early 2000s. He says CITES was a desperate attempt to keep the species alive. “All those guys in Nicaragua, Honduras, and elsewhere,” he has said, “who had paddled their pirogues into the jungle to go kill a jaguar and sell the pelt, were slowly put out of business. CITES, eventually, shut the trade down.”
CITES was imperfect in its implementation, but its impact on the international commerce in jaguar hides reduced the motivation to kill jaguars, at least temporarily. At the local level, however, it did not have the same chilling effect. The domestic trade in jaguar parts persisted.
George Schaller, the world-renowned wildlife scientist who in the late 1970s conducted research on jaguars in the Brazilian Pantanal for the New York Zoological Society (which in 1993 would change its name to the Wildlife Conservation Society, WCS), wrote that despite CITES, jaguar skins were selling for “about 3,000 cruzeiros (equal to about $100),” while ocelot skins were selling for half that, and “professional hunters guid[ed] foreign clients on illegal shoots.”16 Brazil may have been a signatory to CITES, but just across the Paraguay River in Bolivia, Schaller noted, an opportunistic entrepreneur had “opened a tanning factory to handle the many skins smuggled out of the Pantanal… by hunters in dugouts” who “penetrate the swamps and return laden with hides.” He added ominously that the enforcement of CITES was strongly discouraged. “Frontier law,” he wrote, “still operates in the sparsely settled Pantanal; piranhas are adept at disposing of dead bodies.”
Belize was another place where jaguars continued to lose their lives. In the early 1980s the young biologist Alan Rabinowitz, working for the New York Zoological Society, went to central Belize at George Schaller’s urging to study jaguars. There he lived something of a magical life. He walked literally in the tracks of big cats, compiling the most thorough but alarming picture of jaguar life ever produced. Despite CITES and a national wildlife protection act, jaguars were being shot, poisoned, run down by trucks, and chased with dogs by trophy hunters. Their numbers were plummeting. In an alternately arduous and uplifting two-year period, which remains a milestone in the world of jaguar research, Rabinowitz battled poachers, tropical diseases, and parasites, survived a plane crash, and performed the mundane and sometimes dangerous work of a field biologist. He diligently recorded facts and observations in his journals, all the while assembling a written history of the jaguar. “It didn’t take a brain surgeon,” he said, “to see the writing on the wall.”17
End Notes
* Motifs of large felids are one of the several items separating Middle American cultures from the ursine-oriented peoples inhabiting more northern regions.” Brown and López-González, Borderland Jaguars, 67.
1. Nicholas J. Saunders, People of the Jaguar: The Living Spirit of Ancient America (Souvenir Press, 1991), is devoted to those who worship the big cat. Richard Mahler, The Jaguar’s Shadow: Searching for a Mythic Cat (Yale University Press, 2009) also devotes considerable space to examining the jaguar’s mythic significance.
2. A. Starker Leopold, Wildlife of Mexico: The Game Birds and Mammals (University of California Press, 1959).
3. Dan Flores, Coyote America: A Natural and Supernatural History (Basic Books, 2016).
4. Vividly described in Dan Flores, American Serengeti: The Last Big Animals of the Great Plains (University Press of Kansas, 2016).
5. John James Audubon, Audubon and his Journals, ed. Maria R. Audubon (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1897), vol. 2, entry for August 11, 1843.
6. Flores, American Serengeti, 6.
7. David E. Brown and Carlos López-González, Borderland Jaguars: Tigres de la Frontera (University of Utah Press, 2001), 93.
8. Flores, American Serengeti, 56–59.
9. David J. Schmidly, William E. Tydeman, and Alfred L. Gardner, eds., United States Biological Survey: A Compendium of Its History, Personalities, Impacts, and Conflicts (Museum of Texas Tech University, 2016).
10. Ken Ross, Pioneering Conservation in Alaska (University Press of Colorado, 2017), chap. 13.
11. Flores, Coyote America, 123.
† The meeting was held in 1929. Leopold realized that the problems facing the Kaibab deer population, which was destroying the landscape, could be connected directly to the elimination of predators.
12. Rebecca Mead, “Should Leopards Be Paid for Their Spots?” New Yorker, March 21, 2022.
13. Rabinowitz, Indomitable Beast, 78–79; and Barbara Pascarell Brown, “Pretty in Pink: Jacqueline Kennedy and the Politics of Fashion,” master’s thesis, University at Albany, State University of New York, 2012.
14. Esteban Payán and Luis Trujillo, “The Tigrilladas in Colombia,” Cat News 44 (2006).
15. Andre P. Antunes, “Historical Commercial Hunting of Mammals in Amazonia,” in Amazonian Mammals, ed. W. R. Spironello et al. (Springer, 2023).
16. George Schaller, South America Field Notebooks and Journals, George Beals Schaller Collection, Yale Peabody Museum; George B. Schaller, A Naturalist and Other Beasts: Tales from a Life in the Field (Sierra Club Books, 2007), 72–73.
17. Paula Mackay, “Cockscomb: It’s About Cats,” Wildlife Conservation, November–December 2004, 30–34.
James Campbell is the author of Heart of the Jaguar: The Extraordinary Conservation Effort to Save the Americas’ Legendary Cat, The Final Frontiersman: Heimo Korth and His Family, Alone in Alaska’s Arctic Wilderness, Braving It: A Father, a Daughter, and an Unforgettable Journey into the Alaskan Wild, The Color of War: How One Battle Broke Japan and Another Changed America, and The Ghost Mountain Boys: Their Epic March and the Terrifying Battle for New Guinea–The Forgotten War of the South Pacific. He has written for Outside magazine, National Geographic Adventure, Men’s Journal, and many other publications. He lives in Wisconsin.
Header photo by jaguar by Lucas.N.Morgado, courtesy Shutterstock. Photo of James Campbell by Elizabeth Campbell.
