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Jaguar Argumentative Essay

Decent Essays

A Second Chance for a Timeless Species: Is it Too Late for Jaguars in the United States?
February 3rd, a conservation group by the name of “Conservation CATalyst” released a video of the only known wild jaguar in the United States, and stated that they had been tracking him for nearly three years (Bugbee, Neils, and Serraglio 2016). The video shows the muscular, bright cat, named “El Jefe” roaming around in the Santa Rita mountains, just thirty or so miles away from Tuscon, Arizona. When the video was released, it blew up, appearing on big news sources like CNN, Fox News, and ABC News. When I saw this, it caught my attention immediately. I thought jaguars only lived in South America… How could there possibly be a wild jaguar in Arizona? Historically …show more content…

Unfortunately, we are currently down to one known jaguar in Arizona. So some might ask, “If there is only one jaguar left, why try to conserve the species?” Because there is still hope. There is a small breeding population in Sonora, Mexico, and a perfect environment just miles north in Tucson, Arizona(Gutiérrez-González 2015). Seriously. The Santa Rita Mountains are prime real estate for jaguars. Hundreds of thousands of acres of untouched land and deer-abundant mountain ranges are protected by the federal government and set aside specifically for jaguar conservation (Robinson …show more content…

The US Fish and Wildlife Service doesn’t have an active plan of breeding or repopulation for the species, so this seems to be the plan. I don’t think it is a competent plan at all, however. There are a few problems with it. Although male jaguars are very adventurous and will wander for hundreds of miles, it is unlikely that the females will go very far away from Sonora. Without there being females in Tucson, we would just have a few males wandering around the Santa Rita Mountains. It’s better than just one jaguar, I suppose, but it isn’t sustainable in any way. Also, time is definitely of the essence in this situation. Jaguar populations in Mexico are decreasing slowly, and we can’t risk losing the population in Sonora. Also, with Donald Trump becoming a possible future President, a tall, impenetrable wall would make the jaguars migration into Arizona impossible. A possible option for securing our border and still letting jaguars come through would be vehicle barriers. Vehicle barriers would easily allow jaguars to get through, but it would be impossible for cars or motorcycles of any kind to get through(Beckmann 2015). The downside of this type of barrier is that it makes pedestrian passage a possibility, but if placed in very barren, empty desert land it would definitely discourage anyone from trying to get

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