Can They Stay Out Of Harm’s Way?

The morning was just starting to heat up when a biologist, Ricardo Costa, set out to look for jaguars on Fazenda San Francisco, a 30,000-acre cattle ranch, rice farm and wildlife reserve in the region of southwest Brazil known as the Pantanal.

Cattle being watched by a Pantaneiro cowboy.

Soon, along a fringe of scrubby woodland, Mr. Costa spotted a young male jaguar lazing in sun-flecked shade. “It’s Orelha,” he whispered, pointing out the tear in the animal’s right orelha, or ear.

As Mr. Costa watched from the driver’s seat of a Toyota truck, the animal stretched and yawned, exposing teeth strong enough to crunch through the skull of almost anything. “Wonderful!” he said.

The jaguar, Panthera onca — the largest cat in the Americas and the third largest in the world — still prowls the rangelands of the Pantanal, a 74,000-square-mile mosaic of rivers, forests and seasonally flooded savannas that spill from Brazil into neighboring Bolivia and Paraguay.

From the jaguar’s perspective, this vast, wildlife-rich area probably seems close to a slice of heaven — or, at least it would if the big cats were not routinely hunted down in retaliation for cattle losses.

Mr. Costa, for example, said that he worried about Orelha and his more skittish brother, Grandão. Two years ago, he said, an older, larger male who patrolled the same territory was killed when it ventured onto a neighboring ranch.

And now Fernando Azevedo, the senior scientist with whom Mr. Costa has been working, says he has lost 4 of the 14 jaguars he was starting to study at Fazenda São Bento, about 60 miles from San Francisco.

Once again, it appears, the animals were picked off when they wandered away from a ranch where they are protected, onto adjoining properties. Among the casualties, Dr. Azevedo suspects, were an adult female and her two nearly full-grown cubs. Convincing ranchers and ranch hands to end such killing has become a priority for conservationists in the region.

The importance of the Pantanal was underscored last October when Thomas Kaplan, executive chairman of the foundation Panthera, an emerging force in big cat conservation, finalized the purchase of two large ranches and signed an agreement to buy a third, creating a property that will soon total more than 400,000 acres.

The ranches, which will be run by Panthera, are particularly important because they connect previously isolated wildlife preserves. Now, jaguars will be able to travel safely from one sanctuary to the other.

“With jaguars we have the opportunity to play offense,” said Dr. Kaplan, an entrepreneur and financier who in 2006 founded Panthera. “There are certain areas, like the Pantanal, where the wind is at your back.”

Dr. Kaplan said that Panthera’s plan was to continue running cattle on the ranches while testing a broad range of techniques for reducing livestock-jaguar interactions. The results, he hopes, will encourage others to adopt range management practices that encourage co-existence over conflict.

At stake in the Pantanal, conservationists say, is a significant fraction — perhaps 15 percent — of the world’s remaining population of jaguars.

Cattle ranching and jaguar conservation do not need to be mutually exclusive, said Alan Rabinowitz, executive director of the science and exploration program at the Wildlife Conservation Society, based in the Bronx.

“Cattle open up the landscape,” Dr. Rabinowitz said, and enhance habitat for the jaguar’s wild prey. “If you were to take out the cattle and let large areas revert to scrubby vegetation, you’d have far fewer jaguars in the Pantanal than you do today.”

Jaguars can also provide ranchers with an additional source of income. For example, several ranches in the Pantanal, San Francisco among them, run ecotourism operations that have turned a liability into a valuable asset.

Conservationists say that the next decade will be pivotal for jaguars, in the Pantanal and throughout its range, which runs from northern Argentina to the borderlands shared by Mexico and the United States.

No one knows the precise rate at which the number of jaguars is declining or just how many jaguars there are. But the World Conservation Union pegs the total free-ranging population at fewer than 50,000 adults and classifies the animal as near threatened.

Jaguars may not yet be in such desperate shape as Asian tigers, whose noncaptive breeding population has plummeted below 2,500, or African lions, of which there are perhaps only 20,000 to 30,000 left in the wild. But if conflicts with people and their livestock are not soon resolved, conservationists warn, jaguars could quickly trace a similar trajectory.

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