Jaguars (Panthera onca) are beginning to become targeted by wildlife traffickers as demand for their fangs increase in China

Jaguars (Panthera onca) are one of the five cats that belong to the “roaring cats”; the genus Panthera. These are separated from the other cats by their anatomical features that allows them to roar, and we also find tigers, lions, snow leopards, and leopards in this genus.

A jaguar. Image by Kairos14, pisted with the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

The jaguars are found in the Americas, as far north as Southwestern United States, down through most of South America, and as far south as northern Argentina. Like most other big carnivores, their range used to be a lot bigger a few hundred years ago, but they have suffered a big population loss when humans began to be better hunters.

At the moment, the species is considered Near Threatened by the IUCN Red List, based on the fact that their population numbers are decreasing. They are not strictly threatened just yet, but could easily become that if they keep being hunted.

The jaguars are apex predators that only feeds on meat, but they are not picky about what type of meat they eat. They can apparently feed on at least 87 different species, so they are quite opportunistic.

The demand from jaguar fangs in China is increasing

Jaguar fangs have not traditionally been very popular in China, but they had a niche market in the eastern medicine industry. Conservationists have begun to see more evidence of increased jaguar fang smuggling lately, and the awareness mostly begun when an adult jaguar was found fangless in a drainage ditch. This kept on happening, and an ocelot (can easily be mistaken for a small jaguar) was found without his head in the same drainage ditch.

Image by U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, posted as Public Domain.

It is pretty obvious that these animals were killed so that someone could get their fangs, and ecologist Vincent Nijman of Oxford Brookes University in Oxford, UK believes that these are being brought illegally to China. He further explains that the demand for products from the big cats in China is increasing, and the supplying is increasingly coming from other parts of the world such as South America and Africa.

Back in 2014 and 2015, the Bolivian government confiscated 186 jaguar fangs that were found in packages addressed to China, and many of these packages were sent by Chinese people who lived in Bolivia. Another eight packages of 120 fangs were later confiscated in China, and together these two confiscations represent over 150 dead jaguars!

A single jaguar fang can be sold for between $120 to $150, which is more than a regular month’s paycheck in many South American countries. The chain of events is often that local people hunt the jaguars, then sell the fangs to a local Chinese barter. He pays the $120-150 price, then ships the fangs back to China where he makes a nice profit. I was unable to find out how much a fang is sold for in China, but it’s very likely that it is a lot higher than the local people are getting paid for them.

Jaguar funfact; about 6 % of their population has a color morph that makes them completely black! Image by Bardrock, posted with the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license.

How will this affect the jaguar population?

The jaguar population is already fragile, so it’s unfortunate that they might be experiencing more poaching pressure due to the increased demand for fangs. If this keeps up they could easily become more serious threatened with extinction very fast, so we can only hope that the South American governments take this threat seriously!

Will China be changing its attitude towards wildlife products?

It’s pretty easy to see that China is biggest nation that poses a threat to wildlife all over the world, and the wealthy Chinese people seem to love to eat stuff like shark fin soup, or try to cure their cancer with horns from rhinos, or scales from the pangolins. They use a lot of parts from rare and endangered animals because they believe that their “eastern medicine” will cure a lot of problems, but this is of course not backed by science at all.

Crush his scales to a powder, and you can apparently cure cancer, or get your genitals to pump more blood. Image by Piekfrosch at German Wikipedia, posted with the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

Last year the mainland China banned the trade of legal ivory, and earlier this year Hong Kong followed up by doing the same. This means that we do see some improvement in China, so it is not just bad news from the region.

I keep reading about the youth in China that are fed up with the pollution and use of wildlife products, so once this generation grows up to be the ones in charge, change will hopefully happen. We do see that the Chinese people are one of the biggest contributes of the use of renewable energy (along with India), so there is actually a good contribution to renewable energy from China. However, as I'm sure you are all aware, they are also responsible for a huge amount of pollution, so I'm not sure they are really contributing as much as they are pollution just yet.

Thanks for reading

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