Push to name Arizona's new jaguar stirs catroversy

As any pet owner will tell you, a name is just another word for your cat to ignore.

But when it comes to naming the newest jaguar filmed in Southern Arizona, wildlife videographer Jason Miller thinks he’s already picked a winner. He wants the endangered cat to be called Cochise.

“I’m not trying to be selfish about it or anything. I just think it’s a beautiful name,” Miller said.

The Vail resident caught the previously unidentified jaguar on camera on Dec. 20 in the Huachuca Mountains, 90 miles southeast of Tucson.

He released the rare footage through his YouTube channel on Jan. 3, and since then it has been picked up by news outlets across the U.S. and as far away as Europe and Australia.

“It’s been a crazy two weeks,” Miller said.

But should he get to name the jaguar just because he was the first to introduce it to the world?

One local advocate for wild cats doesn’t think so.

“This jaguar doesn’t belong to any one person,” said Aletris Neils, founder and executive director of the Tucson-based nonprofit group Conservation CATalyst.

She thinks the cat should be named through a process that’s more open to the community, ideally one that “incorporates Indigenous values and Indigenous viewpoints.”

Neils said a meeting has been scheduled for Feb. 6 on the Tohono O’odham Reservation to discuss a name for the cat with tribal leaders and school students. She is asking community members to submit suggestions, including Cochise, by Jan. 31 for the tribe to vote on.

There are no rules for naming jaguars or any other wild animals, of course. No government agency or higher authority registers or referees such things. It’s a practice entirely controlled by popular opinion.

And don’t expect state and federal wildlife officials to step in and help settle any naming controversy that might crop up, either.

The Arizona Game and Fish Department doesn’t give names to individual animals, because the practice tends to anthropomorphize them, leading people to wrongly assign human traits to wild creatures, said agency spokesman Mark Hart.

“We don’t think that’s very scientific,” he said. “Names are really in the public domain. We stay out of that.”

What’s in a name

So why are advocacy groups so keen on naming jaguars? For one thing, Neils said, it can be a powerful tool for conservation.

“Having a name helps people relate to them” and to want to see them protected, she said.

“We follow Jane Goodall’s philosophy,” added Neils, referring to the world-renowned primatologist’s practice of assigning descriptive names to the chimpanzees she first started studying in Tanzania in 1960.

Giving jaguars names is a recognition of their individuality, which becomes apparent after you’ve tracked them in the field for a while, Neils said. “When you get to know them, they have very different personalities.”

It’s all just semantics, anyway. As Neils pointed out, even wildlife agencies that resist calling individual jaguars by familiar names still have to have a way to identify the animals.

Sometimes a generic, scientific label will be adopted by the public as an animal’s common name. Such was the case with Macho B, literally Spanish for “male (jaguar) B,” the cat infamously snared by state game trappers and eventually euthanized in 2009.

“There’s a huge debate about whether or not you should name them, but they’re going to be called something whether that’s a name or not,” Neils said.

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Conservation advocate Russ McSpadden from the Center for Biological Diversity remembers hearing the crowd chanting “Macho B” during the All Souls Procession in Tucson, as he and others from the center walked the parade route with a giant jaguar puppet after the cat was killed.

At the time, he said, the experience convinced him of the need to find a name for another big cat roaming the mountains south of Tucson — one simply known then as the Santa Rita jaguar.

That cat became El Jefe, The Boss, in 2015, after McSpadden and company put the matter up for a vote of students at Valencia Middle School, where the mascot is a jaguar.

The center has been at the center of naming two other Arizona jaguars in the years since then: A male cat in the Chiricahua Mountains christened Sombra by students at Tucson’s Paulo Freire Freedom charter school and another male in the Huachucas dubbed Yo’oko Nahsuareo, the Yaqui words for “jaguar warrior,” by students at Hiaki High School on the Pascua Yaqui reservation.

In those cases, McSpadden said conservationists felt free to lead the naming campaign because the footage of the cats was theirs.

The case of this newest jaguar “isn’t as cut and dry,” he said, nor is it a simple matter of “finders, keepers.”

Though Miller was the first to release footage of the new jaguar, Neils said the animal has actually been documented in two different Southern Arizona mountain ranges and caught multiple times on other people’s cameras since March of last year.

“We were aware of this cat prior to it being documented in December,” she said. “We’ve been monitoring this cat for a while.”

Cat campaigning

Both Neils and McSpadden admitted to liking the name Miller came up with, but that’s not really the point. They would prefer to see the selection process opened up to get input from key local community members.

“The center gladly defers to our region’s oldest cultures about naming new jaguars as they’re welcomed home,” McSpadden said.

Neils put it more bluntly.

“I think it would be disrespectful to name it Cochise without consulting with the tribe,” she said. “It’s cultural appropriation.’

Miller insists the name isn’t only meant as a reference to the 19th century Chiricahua Apache leader. It’s also the name of the county where the new jaguar was filmed, and the word translates to “strength of an oak” in the Indigenous language spoken by Cochise.

“I didn’t want to step on anyone’s toes,” he said. “I just liked the sound of it.”

Miller said he’s gotten hundreds of messages so far from people who agree with him.

In recent days, he has been pushing the name on social media and elsewhere. For $34.75, fans of the name can even get themselves a Cochise T-shirt.

Miller said the shirts are being sold by the wife of a friend, who goes by The Creative Recluse on Etsy. He and the woman have agreed to split the proceeds, if there are any.

The Creative Recluse was already selling shirts, mugs, magnets and stickers promoting a private Facebook group Miller runs called Trail Cam Journey, but he said he hasn’t seen any money from that yet.

Profits or not, at least he’ll be getting a cool T-shirt out of the deal. Miller said his Cochise shirt is on the way. “My wife just ordered me one.”

Miller and Neils do agree about one thing: None of this is really up to them. In the end, the new jaguar’s name will be whatever people decide to call it.

For Miller, at least, that decision has already been made.

“I don’t care if they name it Alfred,” he said. “I’m going to call it Cochise.”