Jaguars used to be found as far north as the Grand Canyon, and their historical range may have extended as far north as Oregon and as far east as North Carolina.
For more info, check out the Northern Jaguar Project, which is a conservancy that is trying preserve jaguars in northern Mexico and the United States.
Jaguars are the only true big cats in the Americas. All true big cats cats are either in the genus Panthera or are closely related to that genus. The closest relative of the cougar is the jaguarundi, which is a very small cat, so cougars are technically not big cats.
I am familiar with this issue since I spent most of my life living in South-East Arizona and worked for the Forest Service there for 10 years. Jaguars that live in Mexico do cross into Arizona and New Mexico occasionally, and are even less occasionally spotted and photographed. From my understanding wolves are an issue to ranchers, but jaguars, not so much. Just as Mountain Lions don’t pose a huge threat to ranchers because they eat mostly deer, so Jaguars don’t attack livestock very often because they mostly eat Javelinas.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/10/science/10jaguar.html
I saw a program on jaguars in the Pantanal last night. They really aren’t much of an issue to cattle ranchers either, but they get blamed for every cow lost. The popular perception is often screwy.
I was talking about the conservation of large predators in the general.
We used to have a very healthy population of jaguars in the US, which apparently were centered from western Louisiana to California.
That’s true, ranchers are often quick to blame their losses on wildlife. Like I said above, Mountain Lions aren’t a big threat to cattle, yet some ranchers will kill every one they see because they perceive them as a threat. They completely wiped out the native Prairie Dogs from Southern Arizona because the Prairie Dog Towns ruined good grazing land.
I thought about what I wrote in that post, and I decided that I didn’t agree with what I wrote. I was just dressing up the post, because I do get anti-predator comments.
I got rid of the second part.
I would love it if jaguars could come back to live in the Southwest. I am very pro-predator, but I don’t live in the areas where they are going to be reintroduced. I would love to find ways to mitigate conflicts between people and animals.
I’ve traveled quite a bit in Arizona. It’s a place that where we took several family vacations. I remember being so excited to see my first pronghorn in the Painted Desert and my first elk in the Ponderosa Pine forest north of Flagstaff.
I’ve also been following the Mexican wolf story for a while: http://www.dpcinc.org/blog/2009/11/13/a-victory-for-mexican-wolves/
You’ll probably like my next post: http://retrieverman.wordpress.com/2009/12/14/gambels-quail-and-white-winged-doves/
Actually, I believe the cougar is related to the Cheetah (go figure). There used to be cheetahs in the N.American plains (same time as the sabertooth, etc). Cougars may not be much threat to cattle, but they aren’t too safe in human areas and they can take up horse killing and sheep killing. Like any predator, they tend to go after the easier prey and unfortunately, in suburban/urban areas, that is often people or domestic animals. There are several cases of cougar attacks on people / domestic animals in California. I don’t know about jaguars, as they don’t tend to inhabit the same terrain as cougars. I would imagine that like tigers or cougars, the more close jaguars are to urban areas, the more likely that there will be unfortunate encounters.
That said, reintroduction into remote areas would not appear to be an issue.
Vr, Peggy Richter
Vr, Peggy Richter
Cheetahs are related to the cougar and the jaguarundi. In fact, the jaguarundi is in the same genus as the cougar (which is Puma).
The extinct American cheetah was not the same species or on the same evolutionary path as the modern cheetah. It is believed to have derived from the same common ancestors as the jaguarundi and cougar, which do share a common ancestor with the Old World Cheetah. This is a good example of parallel evolution.
The issue in California is that they are not hunted by people using dogs, and as a result, they have no fear of either. The cats figure out that dogs are tasty, and some move on to eating people.
That said, even in states that do use dogs to hunt them, the cougars have been known to become dog hunters. I remember reading about one that broke into a bedroom in either Arizona or Colorado. It didn’t touch the people, but it did kill a Labrador retriever, which it was targeting.
The following cladogram shows the jaguar is more closely related to the lion than the tiger is.
http://sparkleberrysprings.com/v-web/b2/?p=445
This one: http://www.pnas.org/content/106/2/512/F2.large.jpg
has the N. American “cheetah” and the Old World cheetah plus the cougar cladogram.
the relationship of lion/jaguar is an interesting result given the occasional crossbreeds of lion & tiger that occur in zoos or circus environments (see messy beast – http://www.messybeast.com/genetics/hybrid-cats.htm) but apparently no authenticated cases of Lion/jaguar or tiger/jaguar
vr, Peggy Richter.
Actually, there are lion/jaguars: http://www.bearcreeksanctuary.com/jaglions.htm
A tourguide in Zion National Park in southern Utah told me that coyotes were found to be the main prey species of mountain lioins in the park, after a study of their scat.
I certainly believe it.
I’ve heard of lots of dogs being taken by cougars. It used to be that cougars feared dogs because dogs were used to hunt them and they had to worry about wolves. But no more.
Leopards, which are ecologically quite similar to cougars, love dog meat. They will go out their way to hunt dogs.
Siberian (Amur) tigers are actually not much of a threat to people or livestock in Russia, but they will take dogs. They will even approach a person with a gun just to take the dog walking at his side.
Thanks for posting this link.
Just because an animal poses a threat to humans or dogs in certain circumstances does not give us the right to annihilate the species.
After all, the biggest threat to man is his fellow man. Think World War I, for just one example.