Poor capybara. I feel sorry for this one on many counts. First, for being a capybara – a ridiculous, outsized rodent, a Brobdingnagian (actually Brazilian) guinea pig. For being captured and caged, an indignity for any wild animal, even a big guinea pig. Then released, back into the wild … he thinks – it looks like his natural wetland habitat, grassy with a nice muddy pool to slip quietly into. It sort of is the wild, but it’s a fenced-off piece of it, and within the fence are capybara nemesis No 1 – a pair of hungry jaguars. Mmm, capybara for tea tonight.
They – the feline stars of Natural World: Jaguars - Brazil’s Super Cats (BBC2) – are a pair of young sisters. Their mother rescued her cubs from rising waters, then climbed a tree, exhausted. But unfortunately it was a tree in someone’s garden in the suburbs of Corumbá, a town on the border with Bolivia. A rescue attempt went badly wrong, mum was darted, fell from the tree to her death, two little big cats were orphaned. Aw, I’ll have one, get me a baby jaguar right now Daddy, so cute, here puss. What, they get big and bitey? Well, then they can be turned into rugs … no, no longer acceptable?
Anyway, these two aren’t entirely on their own. They are fostered until they’re big and strong. Now a woman – Lilian the Jaguar Lady – is attempting to do what has never been done before: rewild them (I know, ugly etymologically, but it could be a very good thing ecologically). They have got their large enclosure, in the area where they will be released, but first they must learn to hunt and kill for themselves. Enter the capybara.
Jesus, that’s even worse. Not just prey; he’s practice prey. This may – and does – take a while. But, after a lot of splashing, scratching, clawing and biting, they get there in the end. One fewer capybara in the world, two fuller jaguars. But hey, that’s nature, red in tooth and claw and all that. Plus there are plenty of capybaras, and not enough jaguars.
So, now that these two can hunt and fend for themselves, it’s time for them to be fitted with GPS collars – very undignified and unfetching, surely no chance of hooking up and procreating – and released into the wild. Except that it’s not totally wild around these parts (the Pantanal – lovely, do go if you’re in the Brazil area); most of it is cattle farmland, and to a jaguar a cow is like a big capybara, ie tea. Mmm, steak Saturday. But the farmers don’t like having their livelihoods stolen from under their noses, so they shoot the jaguars, and then you’re back to square one: not enough jaguars.
So the people have to be shown that jaguars can mean livelihood too, via tourism. Well, if you’ve come all that way, from America or Europe or even São Paulo, you want to see more than cows and big guinea pigs, you want apex predators, with spots. So the cowboys are being retrained as big-cat boys, and their wives are working in the new eco-lodges (this is Latin America, where gender roles are very traditional; Lilian is the exception).
The jaguars are getting habituated to being around people, and the tourists are seeing jaguars because they’ve got GPS collars on them, so Lilian and the team and the retrained cowboys know exactly where they are and can take the tourists straight to them. How is that going to look in the photos though, I wonder, the big satellite collar around their wild jaguar from Brazil? Well, it can probably be photoshopped out.
What about the two orphan sisters, how are they doing? Worryingly, on the tracker one has been in the same place for a while, this doesn’t look good at all … Death, yes, but not hers; she’s made a kill. This time a peccary, a wild pig … well, even jaguars like a varied diet. Hmm, pork supper tonight, pass the apple sauce. And I was quite wrong about the ugly collar being an impediment to romance (jaguars are less shallow than I am, clearly): the other sister has hooked up with a local dominant male; maybe it won’t be long before we hear the pitter-patter of little paws.
The project is a success, then: jaguars rewilded, good news for South America’s beautiful big cats. Lilian is happy, the cowboys and their families are happy, the tourists too; there are no losers. Well, apart from the odd peccary, and the capybaras.
