America’s biggest cat needs help: A signature campaign by the WWF is now supposed to call on the Latin American governments to finally implement the transnational rescue plan “Jaguar Road Map”. Corridors are to be created to connect the big cats’ dismembered retreats. In principle, deforestation must be curbed in order to preserve the jaguar and its home. As the nature conservation organization emphasizes, the Europeans are also responsible for the expansion of soy cultivation in South America: “German pigs eat the jaguar,” according to the WWF.
Powerful, elegant and mysterious – the jaguar (Panthera onca) is a symbol of nature in Latin America. With a head-torso length of up to 185 centimeters, it is the third largest cat in the world after the tiger and the lion. As a top predator, it is very important for ecosystems and the jaguar is also a so-called indicator type: If the predator is doing well, the respective ecosystem is also doing well. However, the jaguar has already lost half of its original habitat from North America to Argentina. Deforestation, agricultural use, mining and energy projects, forest fires, urbanization and poaching are driving it more and more into a corner. Many of the shrinking habitats are also cut off from each other, causing the animals to suffer from inbreeding.
Public pressure for protection
These 34 individual populations of the jaguar are also seriously threatened – with only one exception: there are still comparatively many jaguars in the Amazon rainforest. They represent 90 percent of the total stock. “You don’t have to be a math ace to understand that the situation is critical,” says Dirk Embert from WWF Germany. “The jaguars in the Amazon are still doing relatively well, but the more tropical forest we lose there to the overexploitation, the more habitat the jaguars lose in their really last retreat,” says Embert.
The international Jaguar Roadmap 2030 project was launched in 2018 for Jaguar protection. 14 of the total of 18 jaguar distribution countries have agreed to protect the 30 most important habitats of cats more and to connect them with one another. In addition, local communities and indigenous peoples should receive support to prevent human-animal conflicts. Since then, however, there has been minimal progress at best, complains the WWF. The nature conservation organization has therefore started a petition that anyone can participate in online. The aim is to generate public pressure and attention so that the 14 governments in Latin America can finally turn their pledges into action. In addition, Guyana, French Guiana, Nicaragua and Venezuela are invited to join the initiative.
Corridors and fight against deforestation
As the WWF emphasizes, the long-term preservation of the populations primarily requires a continental corridor that connects the jaguars’ last retreats. “The jaguar feels just as much at home in the savannah as it does in the tropical rainforest. He’s a survivor who can swim through barriers like the Panama Canal, ”says Embert. Nevertheless, we have to offer these animals opportunities to move about and counter the fragmentation of their habitats, according to the WWF.
As Embert emphasizes, we in Germany also have a lever in hand to protect the jaguar and its habitats: “Ecosystems in all of South America have to give way to huge soy monocultures. Soy is the fuel of our conventional factory farming. In an exaggerated way, one could also say: German pigs eat the jaguar, ”says Embert. Because soy cultivation is one of the main drivers of deforestation in Latin America and causes almost half of the deforestation indirectly caused by EU imports. Germany is the second largest soy importer in the European Union. “If we want to preserve the jaguar populations in the Amazon, in the Cerrado savannah and in the dry forests of the Chaco, we have to reduce our deforestation footprint through an effective EU supply chain law,” says Embert.
Link to the hands-on campaign for jaguar protection
Source: WWF World Wide Fund For Nature