In May 2019, a headless jaguar carcass turned up at a garbage dump in southern Belize. 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.
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.
“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. “Tackling wildlife crime in most if not all Latin American countries has had zero priority until only very recently.”
For several years, Ms. 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. Experts in wildlife trafficking also saw that many of the jaguar cases were linked to Chinese citizens or destinations in China. In Bolivia, for example, authorities intercepted China-bound packages containing hundreds of jaguar canines, which are fashioned into jewelry. But evidence tying these observations together has been scattered and largely anecdotal.
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. 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.
“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 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.
“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. “If there is demand, it will be fulfilled, even if you go to another continent on the other side of the world.”
“If we can catch this in the beginning, when trade is just increasing, we can change the course of things before it’s too late,” Ms. Morcatty added.
Jaguars have almost been poached to extinction in the past. During the 20th century, hunting for their fur nearly caused the species to disappear. The U.S. accounted for the majority of the jaguar trade, importing more than 23,000 jaguar skins in 1968 and 1969 alone. With jaguar populations plummeting even in remote regions of the Amazon, policymakers banned the big cats from international trade in 1975.
“In the past, we almost lost jaguars because of a very big hunting pressure in a short amount of time,” Ms. Morcatty said. “It’s taken decades of effort and investment from many countries and institutions to recover jaguar populations.”
Jaguars have slowly clawed back, to an estimated 60,000 to 170,000 animals today. But now they are in decline throughout much of their range. While poaching for the illegal trade may not be the primary driver of population losses, it could exacerbate other pressures, Ms. Morcatty said. Ranchers, for example, may be more inclined to kill jaguars on their property if they know they can earn money from the carcasses.
“We shouldn’t let this new threat combine with other threats we already have,” she said.
A similar dynamic is already playing out in Southern Africa. In South Africa, a growing legal trade in the skeletons of captive-bred lions exported to China may have created a new market for poached lion products.
Retaliatory killings of lions that have attacked livestock or people have always occurred in Southern Africa, but now “it’s not just a dead lion that was a problem animal, it’s a dead lion that’s had pieces taken off it and entered into the trade chain,” said Andrew Lemieux, a researcher at the Netherlands Institute for the Study of Crime and Law Enforcement. “There’s lots of money to be made.”
One of the earliest signs of the mounting threat in South America appeared in 2003, when a Chinese man working at a Chinese supermarket in Paramaribo, Suriname, approached a uniformed member of the country’s forestry service and asked him if he could bring him a jaguar.
“My contact told him it was illegal to kill jaguars,” Ms. Verheij said. “He was shocked that the man felt comfortable enough to ask a government official to do something illegal.”
For the official, the conversation ended there. But by 2005, rural hunters in Suriname were fielding orders for jaguar teeth and claws — often delivering the animal’s whole head to Chinese clients in the country’s capital. The buyers turned claws and teeth into pendants to sell at local Chinese-owned jewelry shops, or smuggled them back to China. Several Chinese restaurants in Suriname also began serving jaguar meat upon request. Eventually, entrepreneurial criminals graduated to sourcing entire jaguar carcasses to boil down into a product similar to the tiger bone paste that is used in Chinese medicine.
To estimate the extent to which the problem has grown, Ms. Morcatty and her colleagues searched news stories, technical reports and police records from 2012 through 2018 in all 19 Central and South American countries for mention of seized big cat parts. They found records for 489 seizure incidents representing around 1,000 big cats — primarily jaguars, but also some pumas and ocelots. They calculated that over just five years, the number of jaguars seized increased 200-fold.
“It’s quite remarkable,” Ms. Morcatty said.
Brazil accounted for the highest proportion of cases, followed by Bolivia, Colombia, Peru and Suriname. Most of the seizure records did not indicate the final destination or intended buyer, but Ms. Morcatty was able to definitively link 34 percent to China. China-related seizures contained 13 times the number of jaguar parts, on average, than those intended for the domestic market.
Dr. Lemieux, who was not involved in the research, said the new paper brings into view a region that is generally glossed over by wildlife trade experts. “If you look at the conservation playing field, South America — of all the continents besides Antarctica — gets very little attention,” he said.
Jaguars, likewise, tend to be overshadowed by tigers, lions and leopards, Dr. Lemieux said, but “the international trade in jaguars is definitely something that’s changing.”
Ms. Morcatty and her colleagues analyzed the seizure data against a variety of variables to identify factors that are likely driving the trade. Predictably — and serving as a control — the more jaguars present in a country, the higher the amount of jaguar trafficking. Also not surprisingly, they found that corruption and poverty are significantly associated with the illegal trade.
The second most significant variable after corruption was the direction of private Chinese investment, which has increased tenfold in Central and South America over the last decade, mostly in energy, mining and infrastructure. “In essence, it seems that countries with new Chinese money rolling in are the ones where we see an increase in overseas jaguar trade,” Dr. Nijman said.
Chinese investment itself is not a negative thing, and in fact brings many benefits to Central and South America, said Sue Lieberman, vice president of international policy at the Wildlife Conservation Society who was not involved in the study. “But all efforts should be made to ensure that it is environmentally and socially sound.”
In addition to bringing new potential buyers of jaguar products into the country, development itself — especially if it entails cutting new roads into pristine areas or clearing forests — can facilitate poaching by putting wildlife and people in closer vicinity. A study published in March, for example, found that agricultural expansion in the Amazon led to increased jaguar poaching. When Chinese companies are linked to such development, it only increases the odds of poached animals entering trade.
“Chinese investment into deforestation accelerates trade — it’s connected,” Ms. Morcatty said.
The pattern may be like one observed on the African continent. In a report published last year, Alfan Rija, a conservation ecologist at Sokoine University of Agriculture in Tanzania, found that East Africans often hunt to fulfill Chinese demand, and that the majority of the 45 species they reported hunting — from elephants and rhinos to sea horses and hyenas — are purchased solely or primarily by Chinese individuals.
“Most of the Chinese here are on contract, and you see a similar thing in South and Central America where you have lots of Chinese companies developing things,” Dr. Rija said. “These development opportunities provide avenues for illegal trade.”
The authors of the new study did not investigate what motivates the demand for jaguar parts among Chinese buyers, but Dr. Lieberman and her colleagues have seen advertisements on Chinese social media for jaguar claws and teeth.
“The worst of the trafficking in jaguar parts is not bones to replace tiger bones, but the canines for jewelry,” she said.
China is a major consumer of other big cat species, especially tigers, which have long been sought after for their bones and parts, used in traditional medicine. More recently, tiger teeth and claws have appeared for sale as jewelry. But as tiger populations have dwindled to fewer than 4,000 animals remaining in the wild, traders have looked to other sources to satiate demand, which jaguars might fulfill for some consumers.
Angela Nuñez, a biologist who formerly worked at Bolivia’s Ministry of Environment, said that Ms. Morcatty and her colleagues’ effort to quantify jaguar trade at the regional level mirrors those of smaller-scale studies that Ms. Nuñez and others have published in the past.
But the scale of the problem is almost certainly greater than what is reported in the new study, Ms. Nuñez said, because most countries in Central and South America do not keep official records of jaguar seizures. Detection can also be a challenge because of lack of resources.
Dr. Nijman suspects that jaguars — like elephants and rhinos in Africa — may be canaries in the coal mine for broader, as of yet unnoticed poaching in South and Central America of things like tortoises and orchids.
“By zooming in on the most high profile species, we get a view of what else is happening,” he said. “There’s no reason to assume it’s just jaguars being affected.”
According to Ms. Nuñez, the new research highlights “the need to develop regional strategic partnerships to join efforts toward stopping this threat.”
Chinese companies should also educate their employees about the illegality of jaguar trade and take steps to ensure their workers are not complicit in wildlife crimes, Dr. Lieberman said.
“It’s important to get ahead of the curve by working with Chinese companies and not just wait for a crisis,” she said. “It can be done in a very non-adversarial way.”
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