Jaguar: One Man's Struggle to Establish the World's First Jaguar Preserve Book

Interesting book about jaguars, conservation, and the difficulties involved in even learning enough about the animals to help them. Author Alan Rabinowitz goes to Belize to set up a jaguar preserve (first in the world).

Everything about this is so much harder than we on the outside could have imagined! First of all, just getting there is a pain'even if the plane doesn't crash. The natives are helpful'except when it works in their favor to just kill and skin a jaguar to sell the pelt. Trapping the jaguars is hard. Sedating them is hard. Tracking them is hard. This is an unimaginable task!!! I just sort of assumed that once a country agreed to protect an endangered animal and was setting up a preserve, that the battle was 90% done'not so! The pain and frustration Alan experiences, and the moments of pure joy when things go right are well done and bring this whole adventure home.

There are nice descriptions of the land, and vignettes of the natives (including native medicine and even black magic!). In fact, more than half of the book seems to be about the whole Belize experience, from the food to the native workers and their families, to the drug trade, plumbing, and insects, etc. That would be in fact one of two complaints...I was looking for more about animals. Since the book is called "Jaguar", I assumed it was mostly about them, when it is about the whole effort to get the preserve going, and about the Belize rain forest itself.

The other thing that bothered me was that so many jaguars were injured and died as a result of the trapping methods used in order to study them...