Most wild­life eco­tour­ists in the Pantanal region of South Amer­ica say they are will­ing to com­pensate cattle ranch­ers for live­stock taken by wild jag­uars.

This is accord­ing to a new study, “The num­bers of the beast: Valu­ation of jag­uar (Pan­thera onca) tour­ism and cattle depred­a­tion in the Brazili­an Pantanal”, by Fernando R. Tor­tato, Thi­ago J. Izzo, Rafael Hoo­gesteijn, & Car­los A. Peres pub­lished in Glob­al Eco­logy and Con­ser­va­tion.

The authors show that “jag­uar eco­tour­ism rep­res­ents a gross annu­al income of US$6,827,392 in land-use rev­en­ue across a rep­res­ent­at­ive por­tion the Brazili­an Pantanal” com­pared to “a hypo­thet­ic­al dam­age of only US$121,500 per year in bovine cattle losses”. And they claim that the loss of live­stock due to jag­uar pred­a­tion could be “com­pensated by a sys­tem of vol­un­tary dona­tions from tour­ists, ensur­ing that both tra­di­tion­al live­stock hus­bandry and eco­tour­ism can co-exist with­in the same ranches, thereby pro­mot­ing land­scape-scale jag­uar con­ser­va­tion”.

The research­ers sur­veyed 137 tour­ists in the study area:

Hav­ing been informed of the exist­ence of a con­flict between jag­uars and cattle ranch­ers, tour­ists became aware that observed jag­uars can take both wild and domest­ic­ated prey out­side the park, with 96% agree­ing that a com­pens­a­tion scheme would be required to cov­er the costs of jag­uar depred­a­tion on live­stock. In fact, 95% of all inform­ants believed that jag­uar tour­ism could be a tan­gible source of rev­en­ues for this com­pens­a­tion scheme and 80% agreed to, on aver­age, donate an addi­tion­al 6.8% (SD ± 3.9%) of the value of their all-inclus­ive daily rates …

Extra­pol­at­ing the sur­vey find­ings based on tour­ism num­bers for the study area, this works out to nearly three times more than the US$32 per tour­ist min­im­um dona­tion required to suf­fi­ciently com­pensate cattle ranch­ers.

The authors also con­sidered how ranch­ers might be incentiv­ised to mit­ig­ate their stock losses and pro­tect jag­uars on their prop­er­ties via a “stable com­pens­at­ory part­ner­ship” based on best man­age­ment prac­tices and bench­marks of reas­on­able expec­ted stock losses.

The Pantanal is the world’s largest trop­ic­al wet­land (between 140,000 and 195,000 sq.km) loc­ated mainly in Brazil but also por­tions of Bolivia and Paraguay. (Wiki­pe­dia)

The jag­uar (Pan­thera onca) is the only extant “big cat” feline spe­cies nat­ive to the Amer­icas. The third-largest feline spe­cies after the tiger and the lion, the jag­uar’s range extends from south­west­ern United States and Mex­ico across much of Cent­ral Amer­ica and south to Paraguay and north­ern Argen­tina. (Wiki­pe­dia)

Fea­tured image: A female jag­uar at Piquiri River, the Pantanal, Brazil. By Charles J Sharp (Sharp Pho­to­graphy) (CC BY-SA 4.0) via Wiki­me­dia.

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The num­bers of the beast: Valu­ation of jag­uar (Pan­thera onca) tour­ism and cattle depred­a­tion in the Brazili­an Pantanal (PDF 2 MB; hos­ted off­s­ite) by Fernando R. Tor­tato, Thi­ago J. Izzo, Rafael Hoo­gesteijn, & Car­los A. Peres.