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Earlier this month, after a great deal of
effort on the part of several conservation organizations, the U.S.
Fish and Wildlife Service announced its decision to designate
habitat critical to the survival of the jaguar, and to develop a
long-term recovery plan for this endangered animal.
Although the decision to create a recovery plan
was mandated 14 years ago, when the jaguar was listed as endangered,
the Service decided in 1997 and again in 2006 that designating
critical habitat was “not prudent.” This reversal strikes me as
monumental, acknowledging as it does the jaguar’s right to life, and
the necessity of habitat to support that life.
Every animal on earth has a right to exist.
More. Every animal’s existence is a necessity for the health of the
earth. Only when an ecosystem’s full component of animals live
within their historical habitat is the earth in balance. That means
predators, prey, vegetation that sustains that prey, and clean water
for us all.
Every time we act to restore decimated
populations of the magnificent animals originally part of the
American landscape, we restore a part of our own heritage. Evolving
as a nation on a continent where wildlife and wildland lived in
balance, we have an obligation to restore what we have destroyed.
America has land enough to share. In designating habitat critical
to the survival of the jaguar, and developing a long-term recovery
plan for this animal – one as American as the grizzly bear, the bald
eagle and the buffalo – the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service
acknowledges the necessity of wildness for a healthy land.
Until the 1900s, jaguars ranged from California
to Louisiana. But by 1997 sightings of the largest cat in the
Americas (third largest in the world –after lions and tigers) were
limited to southwestern New Mexico and southeastern Arizona. (The
last known jaguar in the U.S.—Macho B—was killed last year in a
bungled capture attempt by wildlife agencies. Macho B had roamed
the wildlands of southern Arizona for at least 13 years, elusive,
but known.) Even in Latin America, the only place they now live,
jaguar habitat is being destroyed to accommodate development. A
stepped up protection of jaguar migration corridors between the U.S.
and Mexico must be a part of Fish & Wildlife’s plan. We may be—in
the U.S.—touchy about that border, but wildlife does not recognize
borders. (There are many things we can learn from wildlife).
It’s good to see the Fish & Wildlife Service
pull together a plan based on science rather than politics, but, to
give the jaguar a fighting chance, it will be even better to see it
all happen as quickly as possible.
For more information about jaguars, go to the
Defenders of
Wildlife website.
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Obviously, I did not begin the blog I announced
in December. Will I ever? Maybe.
Copyright © 2010 Ruth
Rudner |
