IUCN / SSC Cat Specialist Group - Digital Cat Library |
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| Rabinowitz, A. | |
| Connecting the dots | |
| 2009 Wildlife Conservation: 24-31 | |
Two men dressed as jaguars circle each other and growl, trying to bring rain to a village on the Pacific coast of Mexico. A Mayan farmer in Belize finds jaguar tracks near his thatched hut, and ties his dog inside for the night. A Guahibo shaman in Venezuela paints his face with black spots, then snorts a powerful narcotic through a hollow jaguar bone. A cowboy in the Brazilian Pantanal examines the fresh remains of a cow, looking for characteristic puncture wounds or chipped vertebrae that will tell him a jaguar is prowling the area. These modern-day events, seemingly unrelated, are tied to a cultural heritage that thrived in pre-Columbian empires of the Americas. These are the people of the jaguar, connected by a powerful cultural thread binding them to their ancestors, to one another, and to the world's third largest cat. |
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