Both Arizona and New Mexico have prepared a conservation agreement, and they should complete it. Maybe the plan will even help the beautiful animals filter back again into Arizona from Northern Mexico, where they enjoy protection.
| Two confirmed sightings south
of here, plus some astonishing recent photographs, say
he is. And that makes it urgent
state and federal bureaucrats do more than they are
now planning to protect the huge
cats.
Both Arizona and New Mexico have prepared a conservation agreement, and they should complete it. Maybe the plan will even help the beautiful animals filter back again into Arizona from Northern Mexico, where they enjoy protection. |
|
To start, the status of the elusive spotted jaguar conforms to four of the five legal criteria for a species' listing.
The warm, wet riverine habitat to which the huge cats gravitate is threatened by development and grazing. Illegal hunting endangers the animals. Only inadequate existing regulations protect the creatures. By law, such conditions compel the jaguar's national listing.
As to the state agreement, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service can sign agreements to permit states or counties to take responsibility for local biodiversity. Theoretically, such pacts carry great promise for connecting stewardship to local responsibility.
However, this deal in these circumstances does not make the grade. First, its plans for Arizona and New Mexico barely refer to federal land strategies, and speak not at all to jaguar endangerment in California, Texas and Louisiana - the rest of the animal's historic range.
Moreover, the stopgap agreement recommends almost no specific actions to foster the big felines and remove threats to them. Instead, the agreement focuses almost entirely on non-actions like creating a "Jaguar Conservation Team'', information-gathering, and "monitoring.'' Meanwhile, it provides only the vaguest recommendations and promises of actual on-the-ground action to foster the animals.
The document says only that "perhaps''
state civil and criminal penalties for taking jaguar
"could'' be toughened. It says
only that maybe land-management practices "could be'' altered to protect
jaguar habitat from fragmentation and degradation. And it makes everything
contingent on the ``limits of available funding and personnel.'' In short,
the state plan would base jaguar stewardship on the hope of future action
rather than on the certainty of real intervention.
Meanwhile, a much better course exists: Both the states and the federal Fish and Wildlife Service should act to boost the species. Concerted action would display seriousness; also, it would extend stewardship to the most important habitat of all to the jaguar: the millions of acres of federal land in the region. That would ensure jaguar policy reached places like the Peloncillo Mountains and the Chiricahuas - areas ignored by the state plan.
And a final reason remains for the Fish and Wildlife Service to list the jaguar: Such action conforms to the law. Sure, the ESA entails awkwardness. And maybe the Forest Service, for example, would rather not have to "consult'' to decide if it should remove cattle from certain riparian corridors critical to the cats. But all the same, the species law remains the nation's sound practice - the presiding, imperfect, instrument by which this nation fosters troubled species.
Since the ghostly jaguar is most assuredly troubled, the way forward is clear: Reform the species act, but don't stop using it in the meantime because it falls short of perfection.
