With its final biological opinion on the proposed Rosemont open-pit copper mine in the Santa Rita Mountains just outside of Tucson, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has drawn up an eviction notice — and possibly a death sentence — for America’s only known jaguar.
El Jefe, as he was named in a vote by students from Tucson’s Valencia Middle School, appeared on remote sensor cameras in the Santa Ritas more than 100 times over the past few years. A final report on that monitoring project makes it clear that he used the range as his home territory while he matured into a large, robust adult.
But the Fish and Wildlife Service — the federal agency charged with protecting America’s most vulnerable wildlife, including endangered jaguars — has decided that it’s perfectly fine for a foreign mining company to destroy El Jefe’s home. However, the service’s decision is not the final word on Rosemont, and the mine is far from a done deal.
Hudbay Minerals, Inc. plans to blast a gaping hole in El Jefe’s home turf more than a mile wide and nearly 3,000 feet deep, and then bury thousands of acres of surrounding public land under more than a billion tons of toxic mine waste. Along with brilliant lighting, daily blasting and huge trucks rumbling through the area every seven minutes, the rolling oak woodlands of the Rosemont Valley would be converted from prime jaguar habitat to a vast industrial wasteland.
In documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, Fish and Wildlife’s own scientists came to the obvious conclusion that the Rosemont Mine would destroy El Jefe’s home and possibly kill him. Yet, their conclusions were changed at higher levels of the agency in the latest example of the Service’s stubborn resistance to protecting jaguars. Thankfully, the Endangered Species Act provides citizens with the power to make their government follow its own laws.
It took legal action by the Center for Biological Diversity and its allies to force the Service to protect U.S. jaguars as an endangered species in 1997. Another legal victory compelled the Service in 2014 to designate 764,000 acres —including ground zero at Rosemont — as “critical habitat” that’s essential to jaguar survival and recovery. The designation specifically cited the proposed mine as a major threat.
Yet, Fish and Wildlife’s official position now is that U.S. jaguars are “lone wandering males” from Mexico that don’t matter in the larger scheme of things and are therefore expendable — an allegation that’s disingenuous at best, and not supported by science or common sense.
All male jaguars wander vast distances and live alone, except for brief times when they’re mating. Five of them were photographed in the U.S. in the past 20 years. Clearly they’re trying to reclaim their ancestral homelands here, lands the American Society of Mammalogists declared are “vital to the long-term resilience and survival” of the species.
That’s an acknowledgment that American jaguars are still connected to the small, vulnerable breeding population in northern Mexico. El Jefe was born somewhere south of the border where there are females and then came here when he was young and relatively vulnerable. Now that he’s a large, powerful adult in his reproductive prime, he’s even more capable of making that trip again to visit those females.
Jaguars disappeared from the U.S. because they were persecuted and exterminated in an aggressive predator eradication program undertaken by the federal government in a misguided effort to “tame the West.” Four of them were killed in the Santa Ritas between 1917 and 1920, including at least one female.
We know better now and understand the importance of having these magnificent native cats back on our wild landscapes. That means protecting the places where they live.
The historical record, the law and the science are clear. Jaguars have lived here for thousands of years — they belong in Arizona. Our jaguars are important to the survival and recovery of the species, and they must be protected. The outrageous political decision to betray El Jefe and abandon American jaguar recovery will not stand.
