Jaguars have almost been poached to extinction in the past. “If there is demand, it will be fulfilled, even if you go to another continent on the other side of the world.”
“What we can learn from this is that the patterns we saw in Asia and then in Africa are now starting to emerge in South America,” said Vincent Nijman, a co-author also at Oxford Brookes University. The findings suggest a parallel with poaching patterns seen in Southeast Asia and Africa, in which an increasing presence of businesses from China working on large development projects coincides with increasing legal and illegal wildlife trade, including of big cats. “For the very first time, we have a big picture of what is happening in Central and South America regarding trade in jaguar body parts,” said Thaís Morcatty, a doctoral student in anthropology at Oxford Brookes University in England, and lead author of the study. The findings confirm that seizures of jaguar parts have increased tremendously throughout the region, and that private investment from China is significantly correlated with trafficking of the species. Now, a study published this month in Conservation Biology provides a more complete overview of the illegal trade, bringing together data from all of Central and South America. But evidence tying these observations together has been scattered and largely anecdotal. In Bolivia, for example, authorities intercepted China-bound packages containing hundreds of jaguar canines, which are fashioned into jewelry. Experts in wildlife trafficking also saw that many of the jaguar cases were linked to Chinese citizens or destinations in China. Verheij and others have warned that the jaguar trade appears to be on the rise, at the same time that the big cats are already threatened with extinction, primarily because of habitat loss and revenge killings for livestock predation. “Tackling wildlife crime in most if not all Latin American countries has had zero priority until only very recently.”įor several years, Ms.
“I suspect for a long time it went unnoticed as authorities simply were not paying attention,” said Pauline Verheij, an independent wildlife crime specialist who has investigated the jaguar trade in Suriname and Bolivia in recent years. More than just a national issue, the graphic killing in Belize seemed indicative of a rise in jaguar poaching across the species’ range, from Mexico to Argentina.
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The killing, one in a series of similar incidents, added to local outrage and inspired authorities, private citizens and companies to offer a combined $8,000 reward for information leading to the arrest of the jaguar killer. In May 2019, a headless jaguar carcass turned up at a garbage dump in southern Belize.
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