Activists sporting jaguar costumes and picket signs
outside the Tucson office of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service
received some welcome news in July. After 18 years and two lawsuits
from environmentalists, the agency added the jaguar to the
endangered species list.
“The Fish and Wildlife
Service has been dragged screaming and kicking through this entire
process,” says Kieran Suckling of the Southwest Center for
Biological Diversity. His group led the court battle to force the
agency to act on the jaguar, which was left off the endangered
species list in 1979 due to an “oversight” (HCN
4/14/97).
The listing should stop jaguar poaching
dead in its tracks by imposing stiff penalties for cat-killers,
says Suckling. Federal agencies will also need to protect jaguar
habitat, a move that Suckling hopes will lead to a permanent
population of the cats along the U.S.-Mexican
border.
Arizona Game and Fish officials who
spearheaded a plan to protect the jaguar with the help of
landowners and local governments were frustrated by the listing.
“The best interest of the jaguar would be to get the people on the
ground to be part of the effort to conserve the animals,” says Game
and Fish spokesman Rory Aikens. “Listing means some of those people
may get off the bandwagon.”
Fish and Wildlife
officials say their recovery efforts will be modeled after the
state’s plan, but agency spokesman Jeff Humphrey says they don’t
intend to designate critical habitat for fear of alerting poachers
to “hot jaguar areas.” Suckling insists the agency is required to
define critical habitat. “We expect to have to sue them again,” he
says.
* Greg
Hanscom
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Jaguar limps onto the list.
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
