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For Immediate Release
Monday, December 19, 2016 - 3:00pm
Contact:
Tel: (520) 623.5252
center@biologicaldiversity.org
center@biologicaldiversity.org
Despite New Jaguars in United States, Feds Release Plan to Recover Endangered Jaguars Only in Mexico
New Plan Fails to Guide Recovery in U.S. Southwest
SILVER CITY, N.M. - Just weeks after the news broke of a new jaguar in the United States, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service today released a draft jaguar recovery plan that puts the onus of recovery of northern jaguars entirely on Mexico. The plan’s criteria for recovery and removal of the jaguar from the “endangered” list could be met without any jaguars occupying any of their vast historic range in the United States.
This month a young, male jaguar was photographed in the Huachuca Mountains of southern Arizona. From 2011 until last year, a mature male jaguar known as “El Jefe” was repeatedly photographed in and around the Santa Rita Mountains southeast of Tucson. Another jaguar called “Macho B” was photographed repeatedly from 1996 until he was killed by the Arizona Department of Game and Fish as a result of a botched capture operation in 2009.
“Jaguars are making their presence known in the southwestern United States so it’s disappointing to see the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service put the focus of jaguar recovery solely in Mexico,” said Michael Robinson of the Center for Biological Diversity. “By excluding the best remaining unoccupied jaguar habitat, this plan aims too low to make a difference in saving the jaguar. It’s an extinction plan, not a recovery plan.”
The draft plan, which the Service reluctantly wrote after its 2009 loss in a lawsuit filed by the Center and Defenders of Wildlife, assumes without evidence that 300 jaguars live in Sonora, Mexico — a more optimistic starting point than the Service’s 2012 citation of studies pointing to a maximum of 271 jaguars in the province and possibly as few as 50.
Since 2013 conservationists monitoring the northernmost breeding jaguars in Sonora, via automatic cameras, saw a poaching loss of six of the area’s eight individually identified jaguars, leaving just two known alive. The remainder of the population is less closely monitored but equally at risk.
Jaguars are primarily killed by ranchers who use pesticides imported from the United States to poison the carcasses of collared peccary, or javelinas, which are among the jaguars’ natural prey animals.
“While the plan, importantly, outlines measures that Mexican authorities can take in protecting jaguars, that’s simply not enough,” said Robinson. “Leaving the vast Gila National Forest and Mogollon Plateau off the table leaves the jaguars in Sonora effectively stranded, likely cut off from jaguars farther south and with no genetic rescue on the way from reintroduction to the north.”
What the USFW Service should make official Jaguar
designated habitat
The draft recovery plan’s overly optimistic assumption that 300 jaguars inhabit Sonora underpins the Service’s laissez-faire approach to jaguars in the United States, where no measures will be taken to restore these apex predators.
What the USFW Service should make official Jaguar
designated habitat
The draft recovery plan’s overly optimistic assumption that 300 jaguars inhabit Sonora underpins the Service’s laissez-faire approach to jaguars in the United States, where no measures will be taken to restore these apex predators.
This month a young, male jaguar was photographed in the Huachuca Mountains of southern Arizona. From 2011 until last year, a mature male jaguar known as “El Jefe” was repeatedly photographed in and around the Santa Rita Mountains southeast of Tucson. Another jaguar called “Macho B” was photographed repeatedly from 1996 until he was killed by the Arizona Department of Game and Fish as a result of a botched capture operation in 2009.
The last known female jaguar in the United States was shot by a hunter in 1963 in the Apache National Forest on the Mogollon Plateau in Arizona, in an area where Mexican gray wolves have since been reintroduced.
The draft recovery plan also estimates that Sonora has habitat sufficient to support 1,166 jaguars — an order of magnitude higher than the most recent previous estimate that the province could support just 172 jaguars. Raising the so-called carrying capacity also justifies ignoring the high-quality but unoccupied jaguar habitat in the Gila National Forest and Mogollon Plateau in the U.S. Southwest.
The draft plan divides the jaguar’s vast range in South, Central and North America into two zones — a Pan-America Recovery Unit and a Northwestern Recovery Unit — and leaves the question of how to protect jaguars in the former unit to another day. The plan also ignores the plight of another, isolated jaguar population in northeastern Mexico south of Texas. As for the Northwestern Recovery Unit, comprising the area from Jalisco, Mexico northward to Interstate 10 in southeastern Arizona and southwestern New Mexico, it divides this region into primary and secondary zones, the former consisting of the area in which jaguars currently live and breed and the latter the area farther to the north, including part of the United States, in which jaguars are known to inhabit but not reproduce during the past 50 years.
Conservation actions are prescribed for the primary area, with little attention to the secondary area. Moreover, a so-called “peripheral area” farther north includes the highest-quality jaguar habitat remaining in the U.S. — on the Mogollon Plateau in Arizona and the Gila National Forest in New Mexico — a region dismissed from consideration for recovery.
Background
In 2014, in response to a lawsuit by the Center for Biological Diversity, the Fish and Wildlife Service designated 764,207 acres of “critical habitat” to conserve jaguars in southern Arizona and New Mexico. The designation prohibits federal actions that would harm the habitat, and will be at issue in upcoming Center litigation over the Service’s approval of an open-pit copper mine in the Santa Rita Mountains, part of the critical habitat, where the jaguar El Jefe has been photographed.
In 2014, in response to a lawsuit by the Center for Biological Diversity, the Fish and Wildlife Service designated 764,207 acres of “critical habitat” to conserve jaguars in southern Arizona and New Mexico. The designation prohibits federal actions that would harm the habitat, and will be at issue in upcoming Center litigation over the Service’s approval of an open-pit copper mine in the Santa Rita Mountains, part of the critical habitat, where the jaguar El Jefe has been photographed.
The jaguar was placed on the U.S. endangered species list in 1997 in response to a previous Center lawsuit.
Jaguars evolved in North America thousands of years before colonizing Central and South America. Their fossil remains have been found from as far afield as Nebraska and Maryland; depictions in American Indian art and stories range throughout the South and Midwest; and European explorers and later Americans wrote of their jaguar encounters in states that ranged from California to the Carolinas.
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At the Center for Biological Diversity, we believe that the welfare of human beings is deeply linked to nature - to the existence in our world of a vast diversity of wild animals and plants. Because diversity has intrinsic value, and because its loss impoverishes society, we work to secure a future for all species, great and small, hovering on the brink of extinction. We do so through science, law, and creative media, with a focus on protecting the lands, waters, and climate that species need to survive.
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Trump's Interior Pick Is the Last Hope for Our Public Lands
Former Navy SEAL Ryan Zinke opposes the Republican land heist. He may be the best environmental hope we have in this administration.
It’s the Republican party’s official policy to steal 640 million acres of public land from the American people. And with both the legislative and executive branches of the federal government soon to be under their control, there appeared to be little that could stop them.
But then President-elect Donald Trump announced that he was nominating Ryan Zinke, a former Navy SEAL who voices strong opposition to the great public land heist, as the Secretary of the Interior.
Zinke is a first-term Republican Congressman from Montana who has twice bucked the party line and voted against measures to transfer ownership of public lands from federal to state control. In fact, he’s made the issue something of a calling card. “The sale or transfer of our land is an extreme proposal and I won’t tolerate it,” he said in a June press release.
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"I never have, and never will sell your public land," Zinke wrote in the Billings Gazette.
If confirmed for the cabinet position, Zinke will head the Department of the Interior, which manages federal land and its resources. It’s in charge of agencies like the Bureau of Land Management, the U.S. Geological Survey, and the National Park Service. As Interior Secretary, Zinke would be uniquely positioned to advocate for preserving public lands and able to work to save them. iefly recap, you, I, and every other American owns vast tracts of land throughout the American West. It’s managed on our behalf by the federal government. The priority of federal land management is to facilitate multiple uses—energy extraction, mining, forestry, recreation, wildlife conservation—while preserving the land for future generations. It’s an expensive proposition, but one that gives our country the vast expanses of wild places that make it so unique. We go to our public lands to camp, hunt, fish, and hike, they're where our wildlife lives, and they're what provide our country with critical resources, like clean water.
Not only does state management prioritize profit over preservation, the states also can’t afford to manage the public lands within their borders—virtually guaranteeing their sale to private interests. It’s those energy and mining companies that are playing the long con here,conjuring up states’ rights arguments to empower Republican lawmakers to try and reduce the lands’ protection by transferring control. It’s one of the most dastardly and un-American things taking place in this country right now, and it’s been repeatedly proven thatthere is no upside for the American people in this sale.
Zinke is a fifth-generation Montanan who grew up in Whitefish. There, outdoor activities like skiing, mountain biking, hunting, and fishing are crucial to the local economy. The state’s economic reliance on outdoor recreation is a perfect microcosm of the contribution that industry brings to the nation. “We use our land for hunting, fishing, hiking, and to create jobs,” Zinke has stated. “Our outdoor economy is a billion dollar economic engine for the state that creates jobs.”
Zinke is a fifth-generation Montanan who grew up in Whitefish. There, outdoor activities like skiing, mountain biking, hunting, and fishing are crucial to the local economy. The state’s economic reliance on outdoor recreation is a perfect microcosm of the contribution that industry brings to the nation. “We use our land for hunting, fishing, hiking, and to create jobs,” Zinke has stated. “Our outdoor economy is a billion dollar economic engine for the state that creates jobs.”
Nationwide, the outdoor recreation industry is estimated to be worth$646 billion annually. (An effort to determine its exact amount is underway.) That’s a third larger than the auto industry, but it frequently flies under the radar because it’s composed of numerous small companies rather than three big ones. It’s an industry that would be irrevocably damaged by the loss of public lands—people won’t buy backpacks if there’s nowhere left to go backpacking.
News of Trump tapping Zinke for Interior Secretary has drawn praise from organizations that are working to protect our land. “He really prides himself on being a Theodore Roosevelt Republican and he lives that a little bit more than other people,” Land Tawney, the CEO of Backcountry Hunter and Anglers, told the Washington Post. Zinke is both a hunter and an angler.
It's his participation in those activities that’s said to have drawn the interest of Trump’s team. The President-elect’s son, Donald Trump Jr., is a prolific hunter and also an advocate for protecting public land. The ability to hunt on public land and the animal conservation that activity provides in this country is fundamental to the egalitarian identity of the American hunter. That Trump’s sons hunt, and that through hunting they are exposed to such a strong pro-public lands message, is possibly what’s going to keep this land in federal hands.
Zinke isn’t universally lauded. While he advocates for retaining federal land management, he also wants to see that land opened up for more resource extraction. “The need to keep dirty fuels in the ground is urgent, especially on public lands,” stated the Sierra Club, in response. “We cannot afford to have someone in charge who traffics in climate denial and acts accordingly.”
Still, he may be the best environmental hope we have in this administration, given the other choices. The Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership is “very supportive” of Zinke. Its president, Whit Fosburgh, stated, “He’s shown courage and commitment to public lands and conservation and is someone we think would be an excellent secretary of Interior.”
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THE ENDANGERED SPECIES ACT OF 1973 PASSED THE HOUSE
BY A VOTE OF 390-12; Passed the Senate by a vote of 92-0
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THE ENDANGERED SPECIES ACT OF 1973 PASSED THE HOUSE
BY A VOTE OF 390-12; Passed the Senate by a vote of 92-0
| Endangered Species Act of 1973 | |
 | |
| United States Congress | |
| Full text: | United States Congress |
| Legislative history | |
| Introduced: | June 12, 1973 (in the Senate) |
| House vote: | 390-12; September 18, 1973 |
| Senate vote: | 92-0; July 24, 1973 |
| Conference vote (House): | 355-4; December 19, 1973 |
| Conference vote (Senate): | Approved; December 19, 1973 |
| President: | Richard Nixon |
| Signed: | December 28, 1973 |
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