USFWS Designates 764,207 acres as Jaguar Critical Habitat

The US Fish and Wildlife Service has designated more than 3/4 million acres of Arizona and New Mexico are designated as critical habitat, claiming this is “essential” to prevent a range-wide extinction of the entire species.

Despite this bizarre determination with only minimal resemblance to credible science, the agency has correctly acknowledged the results of SACPA’s intensive investigation into the dubious records of a female jaguar killed at Big Lake in 1963 and a male jaguar killed in January 1964 in the snow on the Mogollon Rim within the Fort Apache Indian Reservation. The Service recognizes these two jaguars were most likely imported for the purpose of sport hunting (although SACPA provided strong evidence they may actually have been released into the wild to dispose of evidence of Lacey Act violations). Had SACPA not contributed this important information in formal comment, the final critical habitat rule may have covered far more territory, and the Service could errantly have ruled that there were female jaguars in Arizona, or even a “breeding population” in Arizona at the “time of listing,” which the Service has re-defined to mean any time between 1962 and the present.

We thank Dennis Parker for his excellent work and we thank every person and organization who contributed their hard earned dollars to fund his very important research.

Click this link to read the final Federal Register notice 2014.03.05.FR Notice Final Jaguar CH FR 79 No43. 

This page was last updated March 5, 2014.