US border block threatens the Jaguar

The jaguar could be the real victim as America hastens to stop immigration over its Mexico border.

Kieran Suckling, of the US Centre for Biological Diversity, claims how US plans to build a wall along the Mexico/US border would stop jaguars crossing the border and entering the US. This is all despite plans from the centre to set up refuges that would aim to save the species by creating breeding populations.

Suckling has explained how the US is currently the jaguars’ best hope of stopping extinction, with current numbers declining rapidly.

Activists blame the Bush administration for putting political reasons above the survival of the Panthera onca species, arguably one of the world’s most endangered and exquisite large cats.

Jaguars used to be common within the south of the US but were wiped out in the sixties with the last jaguar shot in 1963.

Conservationists were however recently pleased to discover jaguars had been returning to the states of Arizona and New Mexico, perhaps due to global warming.

Plans had then been made by Suckling and his colleagues to use these stray jaguars as a core for a breeding population but have now been told their plans will not be used by the US Fish and Wildlife Service.

Suckling states how this was due to the Bush administration’s displeasure with their plans, which would have required gaps in the Mexican wall.

Yet biologists have claimed that the US, with it’s ecology conscious attitude and wild places, would have been the best place for the survival of the animal.