Death in the Silent Places by Peter Hathaway Capstick

Author:Peter Hathaway Capstick
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2011-10-20T16:00:00+00:00

Hallelujah, brother!

Would it be unreasonable to suggest that the same economic dynamics might apply to some areas of the jaguar’s status, too?

The jaguar, or tigre—literally “tiger” in Spanish or Portuguese—was once fairly well established in the United States, as well as in its more southern current home. If memory serves me right, Smith and Wesson ran some early dramatic ads for their revolvers featuring jaguars attacking cowboys, presumably in the American Southwest. Once prowling as far north as Arkansas, it is now an extremely rare animal north of Mexico, although some experts feel that it is again expanding its range toward the United States. It is by far the largest of the New World cats, ranking about third in size with the rest of the true panthers—the lion, tiger and leopard.

There has always been considerable discussion about the size of a “big” male jaguar. Appearing to the uninitiated as rather an overweight leopard, estimates vary from 250 pounds as the top weight all the way up to the whopper I saw a poor-quality photo of while hunting in Brazil, on cattle scales tipping in at 460 pounds (209 kilos on the metric scales). There’s no doubt in my mind that, as the Brazilians claim, many localized races of jaguars may vary considerably in size because of particular genetic and/or dietary conditions. Therefore, a “big” jaguar in Mexico might weigh 200 pounds, and in the Mato Grosso as much as 350 or more pounds. One skin from a jaguar, killed by Siemel, was reported by the famous hunter and author, Russell B. Aitken, who photographed it, as bigger than a very large male African lion. No weight was given, if, indeed, the cat was ever weighed, but the size would indicate well over 400 pounds.

Few naturalists would argue that the largest race of jaguars is that of the Mato Grosso, although some very hefty specimens have come from Amazonia. In the Xingu Basin, a southern tributary of the Amazon where I hunted, the largest type was locally called the canguçu, so named for the peculiar “swallow wing” pattern of the rosette conformation on the hide. Three distinct types of jaguar were supposed to be recognized in the Xingu, although whether they were merely individual differences between single animals or truly disparate races I could not say.

Despite a cosmetic similarity to the leopard at first glance, jaguars are really quite different, beside being half-again heavier and stronger. Possibly they are not quite so agile as the unbelievably shifty leopard, yet are thoroughly aboreal, as well as aquatically adapted. For all practical purposes as strong as a lion or a fair-sized tiger—which is the largest of all the cats—the jaguar feeds on virtually any meat he can catch, including swamp deer, tapir, capybara, fish, birds, snakes, alligators and domestic cattle. Whereas the other big cats, especially lions, tend to kill by biting the windpipe and keeping it closed until their victim suffocates (despite the common belief that they pull down big game in

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