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Full of beauty and grace, the jaguar is a symbol of mystery and wildness throughout the Americas. With its chesty roar, the jaguar has a reputation that invokes the depths of imagination. El tigre is known far and wide as a magical cat — elusive, crafty, and fierce. So powerful was the jaguar, it was once worshiped by ancient civilizations as a god. Yet today the great cat teeters on the brink of extinction.
ENDANGERED SPECIES ACT PROFILE
PROTECTION STATUS: Endangered
YEAR PLACED ON LIST: 1972 (foreign list only); 1997 ( United States)
CRITICAL HABITAT: None
RECOVERY PLAN: None
RANGE: North from Argentina to the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, where a small population continues to live
THREATS: Habitat loss, federal predator control, and construction of a U.S.-Mexico border wall
POPULATION TREND: There are an estimated 10,000 jaguars left in the wild today, including approximately 500 in Mexico. Though jaguars once roamed throughout the southern United States, only four jaguars have been known in Arizona and New Mexico since the mid-1990s.
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SAVING THE JAGUAR
While individual jaguars still occupy small portions of the southwestern United States, this large, spotted cat has all but been eliminated from the country as a result of habitat loss and persecution. Due to an administrative oversight, jaguars were not protected domestically until 1997, when, in response to a legal and grassroots campaign led by the Center, the jaguar was finally listed as endangered within the United States.
Now the Center is working to bring back the jaguar. Through participation with the multi-agency Jaguar Conservation Team and working closely with the scientific community, we helped identify more than 62 million acres of potential jaguar habitat in Arizona and New Mexico, much of which is vital to the long-term survival of the species.
We've sued the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to develop a recovery plan and designate critical habitat as required by the Endangered Species Act. Litigation is necessary to ensure that the biological needs of recovering jaguars are prioritized over politics. We're working to limit U.S.-government-sponsored predator control that imperils jaguars with traps, poisons, and hounds. And we have taken an active stance against walling off the U.S.-Mexico border to ensure that jaguars will always have access to the full extent of their range. Specifically, in April 2008, we challenged a Service “finding” that a recovery plan wouldn’t benefit the jaguar — signed four months after the Service said a border wall wouldn’t hurt the magnificent predator.
ACTION TIMELINE
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NATURAL HISTORY
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Contact: Michael Robinson
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