Dr. Alan Rabinowitz, you may not be familiar with the name, but he’s the man who literally wrote the book on jaguars in Belize. He did! The book is called Jaguar and, published in 1986, it details his work in establishing the Cockscomb Wildlife Reserve. Today, we caught up with Rabinowitz who is visiting Belize’s emerging jaguar expert, Omar Figueroa. Figueroa as we’ve told you is working in 18,000 acres of reserve in central Belize. That’s only a small portion of all the nature reserves that are arrayed across the country. But that’s a far cry from 1978, and Rabinowitz told us that when he first came to Belize, the idea of a reserve or even wildlife conservation was laughable.

Jules Vasquez Reporting,
He first came to Belize in 1978 – at that time no one had studied jaguars in the rainforest.

Dr. Alan Rabinowitz,
“What I saw shocked me. There were jaguars everywhere, there were jaguars right outside of Belize City, there were jaguars coming into the edges of Belize City. When I first came into Belize, I ended up going to meet the Chief Forest Officer, Henry Flowers at the time, and I said to him I would like permission to study jaguars, capture jaguars. He said what do you want to do that for, you don’t need permission, people are shooting jaguars, there are lots of jaguars – if you want to go capture jaguars, go do it.”

And that’s just what he did in the Cockscomb Basin finding a healthy jaguar population, but one under sustained threat from hunters. So he had the at that time outlandish idea to set up a jaguar reserve.

Dr. Alan Rabinowitz
“Cause at the time Belize had no protected areas system. Guanacaste Park was the only terrestrial protected area, that little park outside of Belmopan. There were no other protected areas in the entire country because why would you need protected areas if there is so much jungle and so much wildlife. I got an audience with not only the Prime Minister but his entire Cabinet and I think I was kind of a sideshow for the Cabinet. They wanted me to kind of make a growling sound like a jaguar in front of all the Ministers and to talk about my adventures chasing jaguars because they didn’t know why anybody would want to chase jaguars back in the jungle.

The Ministers said why do we need a protected area, you have jaguars all over Belize, why do we have to set aside one area and protect it for jaguars. And I said because I in the future, Belize is going to have to develop, all this forest won’t be here in the future, I don’t what will or won’t be, but we’re going to need protected areas for the jaguars and I think tourists will come to the jungles and want to see jaguars. So the Cabinet voted, it ended up being a split vote and Prime Minister Price actually broke the vote and he said to let’s try it.”

The rest is history the Cockscomb became the world’s first jaguar reserve.

Dr. Alan Rabinowitz,
“So it was actually first set up as a forest reserve with a no hunting policy for jaguars. That way they would protect the jaguars but would leave the flexibility if they wanted to use the area, if it didn’t work out. And then it eventually morphed into a wildlife sanctuary and then a national park.

Prince Phillip came and visited the Cockscomb, it gave it big international repute. My book Jaguar, which I wrote about the Cockscomb, my experiences, did very well, people actually started coming and then the whole protected area system just boomed in Belize, partly as a result of Cockscomb but it was also because the whole industry was taking off at that time and it was just a phenomenal success story which I never really planned but if you do things the right way I think and for the right reasons then I think it ends up being very much bigger than you could ever imagine.

I don’t think I did much, I just planted one very small seed in the ground. Now 1,000 things could have stomped on that seed and just wiped it out but the people of Belize and all those people that followed ended up nurturing that seed and growing something very small into something very huge.”

And taking up the mantle now is Omar Figeuroa and his jaguar research in the Pecarry Hills and Runaway Creek reserves.

Dr. Alan Rabinowitz,
“For all of the years that we were sending other researchers down to follow up on jaguars and other research, I always was hoping that we’d have good caring Belizeans who also wanted to follow in the steps of wildlife and nobody ever really rose up to the top. When I heard about Omar I almost couldn’t believe it, I was thinking well what does he really want or is this going to work out.”

Jules Vasquez,
How excited are you to see the body of work or the body of data that comes from these GPS collars?

Dr. Alan Rabinowitz,
“Very excited. Omar is doing a phenomenal job. First of all Omar is capturing jaguars better than I did because I didn’t know what I was doing a lot of times and I didn’t have outside help because nobody else had ever done it. So I used old jaguar hunters, I used traps built by the Mennonites, and everything worked but unfortunately some jaguars got injured in my study, some even died as a result and that was very very bad and it really hurt me a lot. Omar has gone way beyond that. He knows all the best techniques, he has all the best equipment, he is catching more jaguars than I ever did or could, he is getting much better data than any jaguar person doing research today, using these GPS collars. So I thrilled, I couldn’t be happier that somebody like Omar is now leading the way. He is determined, he loves wildlife, he is determined to finish his PHD, do it well, work on jaguars, be in Belize and really work to save the country’s future, not only in jaguars but its natural resources and find that balance between research and development and resource preservation and Omar’s a hero for that.”

Rabinowitz heads the New York based Panthera Foundation which provides partial funding for Omar Figueroa’s research. He was worked extensively on groundbreaking big cat projects in southeastern Asia and Taiwan. Six years ago, he was diagnosed with chronic lymphatic leukaemia, a terminal condition, but says that has only helped him gain a fresh perspective on work and life.