Dark and light taming panther11/13/2022 ![]() It's not something I normally did, for obvious safety reasons. It was getting late, but I decided to follow these tracks a short ways into the jungle in case, by some stroke of luck, I could see this jaguar. As I was walking, I encountered a set of tracks I had never seen before-a big set of tracks from a large male. I went back into the area to look for jaguar tracks and in some ways say my goodbyes. What happened?Īfter several years' research in the jungle in Belize, I had set up the world's first and only jaguar preserve. Twenty-six years later in Belize you had another, this time frightening, encounter with a jaguar. And if I could, I would one day help them out of that cage. They were like me, trapped inside a cage not of their making. All I knew is that these cats made me feel whole. I had no idea what I would be in life or that I would ever work on jaguars. So I would go to the bars, wait until nobody was around, and talk to the jaguar-tell it my hopes and dreams, whether it was a bad day at school or how stupid I felt people were because they didn't try to understand me.Īnd I would never leave that enclosure without promising the cats that if I ever found my voice, I would try to be their voice and help them. But the jaguar would mostly stay quiet, watching everybody pass by, in a world of its own. All the other cats would charge at the bars or vocalize. I could feel their power and what I thought was their frustration at being locked inside these little cages.īut I would always be drawn to this one cage, with a solitary jaguar. My favorite place was the Lion House, as it was called back then-cage after cage of these big cats, roaring and vocalizing. My father recognized this pretty early, and he would take me to the Bronx Zoo. But from a very young age, I realized I could take comfort from and even speak, semifluently, to animals. So my entire childhood was filled with the feeling that I was not normal. They called it "frozen mouth" at the time. I had very, very bad speech blocks and would spasm and shake, trying to get the words out. Tell us about the young Alan Rabinowitz.įrom the earliest time I can remember, I was unable to speak the way other people speak, fluently and easily. The book begins with a moving story of a childhood encounter with a jaguar. Speaking from his home in New York, he talks about how a childhood speech impediment made him bond with jaguars, how a fur coat worn by Jackie Kennedy triggered a catastrophic decline in jaguar populations, and how looking to jaguars could help us deal with problems we face, like climate change. And he was the moving force behind identifying and securing jaguar corridors throughout Central and South America. He established the world's first jaguar sanctuary, the Cockscomb Basin Preserve, in Belize. Alan Rabinowitz, author of Jaguar: An Indomitable Beast, has devoted his life to studying and protecting jaguars. ![]()
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