As the human population has grown in the Pantanal, the vast wetland in central Brazil, people and big cats — namely the South American jaguar — are encroaching increasingly on each other's territory. When conflict occurs, as it inevitably does, the cats are usually the ones who lose.
As the human population has grown in the Pantanal, the vast wetland in central Brazil, people and big cats — namely the South American jaguar — are encroaching increasingly on each other's territory. When conflict occurs, as it inevitably does, the cats are usually the ones who lose.
From the distance of a magazine story or a National Geographic special, it can be hard to understand why anyone would want to kill the very beautiful, very endangered jaguar. But if you're a Brazilian cattle farmer whose cows keep getting eaten by jaguars, the killing makes a little more sense. (See pictures of 10 species on the brink.)
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This is the kind of situation to which conservationists might have responded by cordoning off protected habitats and reserves — building a fence, in effect, between the wild animals and the people. But in the Pantanal, and in much of the rest of our once wild, once underpopulated world, total separation is simply not a sustainable option. That's especially true for jaguars and other big cats, which need a lot of room to roam, far more than could be fenced off. "The big cats' territory is crossing over to the human landscape," says Alan Rabinowitz, a renowned conservationist and the president of the new wildlife group Panthera. "At its root, we have to get people to be able to live with the big cats."
