MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
The U.S. needs jaguars - yes, the jungle cat. They used to roam much of the country, from Southern California to Texas, maybe beyond. Then, around the early 1900s, poaching ramped up. Ranchers feared the cats were preying on cattle, and jaguars were basically hunted out. Enter a project across the border in Mexico that works with ranchers to protect jaguars and might bode well for efforts to restore them to the U.S. Benji Jones went to take a look and wrote about it for Vox. Benji Jones, welcome.
BENJI JONES: Thank you so much for having me.
KELLY: Why does the U.S. need jaguars? And I guess I'll start by saying I didn't know that they're an American species.
JONES: Yeah, a lot of people don't know that they're an American species. And you're right - they likely came into the U.S. before making their way down in their evolutionary history to Central and South America, so they truly are a U.S. species. And in terms of why we need jaguars, I mean, we really need these cats for the ecosystems because they play a vital role in the food chain as the top predators. So they help control other species below them, which then control the grass and so forth. So they really are an integral part of the ecosystem.
KELLY: OK, so let me take you across the border - Sonora, Mexico - and this project I mentioned, which launched a few years ago now, back in 2007. What is it called? How does it work?
JONES: Yeah, so it's a really innovative project called Viviendo Con Felinos, which just means living with felines or cats - wild cats. And so in Sonora, which is the northern Mexico state just below Arizona, there is also this issue where you have ranchers in some cases killing jaguars for their perceived - because they believe that they attacked their calves. And calves are very important to the ranchers 'cause they sell them and that's their livelihood. And so this project is trying to change the perspective of ranchers and provide an opportunity for them to live more harmoniously with jaguars and other wild cats by essentially paying them for the presence of these cats on their ranches.
KELLY: And it's through photography. Explain that.
JONES: Yeah, it's really amazing. So one thing that's interesting about jaguars is that they are really hard to see face-to-face. They're sort of these, like, ghosts on the landscape that you just never see. So people who have worked in these regions of Mexico for a very long time never see them face-to-face. But if you put out motion cameras - so cameras that activate every time something walks by - they will detect these very elusive creatures. And so what this project does is actually put these motion-sensing cameras around the ranch and then those cameras will detect the cats, and every time they detect a new jaguar or a puma, those ranchers will get paid for that detection. So basically, it's creating this incentive to keep these cats on their land.
KELLY: How much is a picture of a jaguar worth if you are a rancher in Mexico?
JONES: Yes, so a picture of a jaguar is worth 5,000 pesos - Mexican pesos - each, which is about $260 in today's U.S. dollars. I should say, 5,000 Mexican pesos is similar to what someone in Mexico might make for killing a jaguar. So ranchers that think they have a problem with jaguars killing their calves, in the past, at least, would pay cowboys to kill jaguars, and they might pay them around $5,000. And that was very deliberate, to try to make this payment of a photo of a live jaguar similar to what you could make for killing them.
KELLY: OK, so to the question of how this program might inform what happens with the jaguar population here in the U.S. - like, what is the link there?
JONES: So we used to have jaguars from Southern California all the way to Texas and maybe even Louisiana, and there's no longer a breeding population of cats in that region. The northernmost breeding population of jaguars in the world is around this reserve - is around these ranches that I was talking about. And so if you want to have jaguars return to the southern U.S. without physically, like, transporting them, you need a healthy population in Sonora that could naturally migrate north over time. And so the idea is that if you can protect this population in Sonora, figure out how to avoid this retaliatory killing of the cats, you might see a northward migration into the U.S. Then, of course, the question becomes, OK, well, what about the border and the border wall? And that's a whole other problem.
KELLY: Benji Jones is an environmental correspondent at Vox. Thanks for sharing your reporting.
JONES: Thanks so much, Mary Louise. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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