The following is the opinion and analysis of the writer:
Michael Robinson
On Jan. 16, 1964, a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service trapper in eastern Arizona killed a jaguar — likely the last of his kind to have been born free in the United States. Eight years later, after concern about extinction had led to the creation of a federal list of endangered species, the Service placed the jaguar on that list.
That listing should have served as the foundation for bringing jaguars back to the Southwest to resume their ancient role in our ecosystems. But unlike endangered wolves, which the federal government also exterminated in the west for the livestock industry, the Service has not reintroduced jaguars.
The Service should do so, especially considering this big cat’s growing imperilment in northern Mexico, which reintroduction to the U.S. Southwest could relieve. The jaguars in Mexico could increase their critically low genetic diversity if only they could mate with newly placed jaguars to their north.
Given the steep odds against jaguars recovering in the United States on their own, the Center for Biological Diversity, where I work, has provided the Service with extensive scientific and historic information that shows why and where jaguars should be reintroduced.
Studies identify the Gila National Forest in western New Mexico — dozens of miles north of the international border — as the most promising jaguar habitat in the United States.
Today just two jaguars, both born in Mexico, are known to live wild north of the border. Since 2016, motion-operated cameras have repeatedly photographed one of them in Arizona’s Chiricahua Mountains. Middle-school students in Tucson named him Sombra — “shadow” in Spanish. On Dec. 30, 2023, a different jaguar was caught on camera, likely also a far-traveling male.
They could be among the last wild jaguars on U.S. soil, and not just because of the border wall that cuts off some places where their species had previously crossed from Mexico. It’s also because jaguars in northwestern Mexico are persecuted and largely isolated from other populations because of habitat destruction. It’s a recipe that could send jaguars in Mexico on a course to rarity and oblivion, just like in the United States.
This would be a profound ecological and historic loss for both Mexico and the United States. Ice age jaguar bones unearthed from Florida to Washington prove that the jaguar evolved in North America before wandering to Central and South America. Long ago, Native Americans from across today’s United States painted spotted cats with long tails and described them in oral histories. And during European colonization, explorers reported jaguars from the Carolinas to California.
As settlers gunned down large herbivores, carnivores turned to livestock. As early as 1703, South Carolina enacted a bounty that paid 10 shillings for each dead “wolfe, tyger or beare.” By 1930, a federal policy formalized the targeting of all jaguars. Thirty-four years later, the last U.S.-born jaguar was killed, and the centuries-long eradication effort was complete.
Still, seven years after protecting jaguars under the Endangered Species Act, the Service delisted them in the United States with no justification. Our litigation restored their protections in 1997, but the Service sought to limit recovery only to Mexico, ignoring that jaguars are native to the entire U.S. Southwest and belong here.
The deer- and elk-filled Gila National Forest provides the perfect habitat for jaguars to return to. Large carnivores like jaguars help balance ecosystems and play an invaluable role that will only become more important as our world is altered by climate change.
Within cat-padding distance of where the last U.S.-born jaguar met a cruel death at the hands of a Fish and Wildlife Service trapper, that same agency should restore jaguars to finally help save this magnificent yet cryptic felid from extinction and to enrich the breathtaking Gila National Forest.
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