An Old Threat Resurfaces
THE
JAGUAR’S CORPSE was ceremoniously extended on
the ground. Its eyes were closed, and a swarm of
flies hovered over its half-opened jaws. “This
is the dangerous species that lives in the
woods,” intones the man filming the dead animal
with his cellphone in Sranan Tongo, the
vernacular language of Suriname. “Today is the
day you were shot.” He steps away from the lean
corpse of the feline, beautiful even in death,
before continuing: “We had seen [you] a couple
of times before. You were doing a show, and
today we shot you. We are going to cook you and
eat you.”
In
September of 2022, the video of the dead jaguar
started circulating in Surinamese social media.
One of the first people to receive it was Els
van Lavieren, a Marine & Wildlife
Conservation Program manager at Conservation
International Suriname and a consultant for the
big cat conservation group Panthera. Van
Lavieren, an affable Dutch primatologist with a
leonine mane, had been analyzing the dynamics of
wildlife trafficking in the small South American
nation for almost half a decade. During that
time, she had compiled a database of events
related to the illegal trade of felines. There
were 70 records involving jaguars: fangs sold at
massage centers and Chinese stores, pelts seized
near illegal gold mines or at small roadside
stands, jaguar skulls in jewelry stores,
week-old cubs in private residences, and
carcasses paraded in logging camps, farms, and,
as in this footage, on social media.
This
particular video confounded her. Outside of some
small factions in Suriname’s Chinese community,
who might partake of jaguar parts for their
supposed medicinal purposes, she had never heard
of people eating jaguars…
Early
last year, I traveled to Suriname to investigate
the trafficking of jaguar parts from America to
Asia, where people reportedly use the fangs,
bones, and claws as ingredients in traditional
Chinese medicine, or as luxury status symbols in
a subculture known as Wenwan...
The
illegal trade of jaguar parts is a relatively
old story... But unlike the wider trafficking of
jaguar parts, reports from Suriname about the
production of jaguar paste — a replacement for
tiger glue, popular in Vietnam and Thailand for
supposed health benefits — was new. This made
the country a great candidate for understanding
the evolution of the trade.
Journalist Santiago Willis’s
feature in our Autumn
2023 print issue delves into
jaguar-poaching in Suriname, one of South
America's most obscure countries, as rising
demand for this big cat’s body parts threatens
to undo decades of conservation work.
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