ON THE EDGE OF EXTINCTION - A - THE TIGER (Panthera tigris)

[peter]

IM MEMORIAM:  DR. ALAN ROBERT RABINOWITZ (December 31, 1953 - August 5, 1918) - VOICE OF THE NATURAL WORLD

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1 - Introduction

When young, I invested a lot of time in finding books about wild big cats. In my home town, it was far from easy. This was the reason I decided to look elsewhere. I found a good store in a small city not too far from Amsterdam. When I had bought just about everything of interest, the owner told me he had found a book not yet known over here.   

It was 'Jaguar, Struggle and Triumph in the Jungles of Belize'  (1986). I had not heard of Alan Rabinowitz before, but after finishing the book I asked the owner to keep me informed about his whereabouts. He did until he had to close the store. The flipside of the internet is people read less than they did. A great pity.

Good books about wild big cats are few and far between. Most of them were written a long time ago. Books published after, say, 1960 didn't really compare. The book about the Indian tiger written by Dr. Schaller was quite exceptional in this respect. Same for the book about the Belize jaguar written by Rabinowitz.

My trade is tigers, but I also try to keep in touch with jaguars. The reason is personal experience. In the early eighties of the last century, I visited Surinam, French Guyana and the northern part of Brazil. When doing a trip into the interior of Surinam, the guide noticed I had something else on my mind. He proposed to go to a wild place he knew well in order to see the things I was after. 

Our first stop was an island in a big river. The guide didn't sleep in a tent, but under the canoe. Although experienced, he too didn't hear or see the jaguar visiting our camp at night. His prints, right in front of the tent, said he was just saying hello. That day, we explored the island. Although it wasn't overly large, we didn't seen him. 

Next morning, we saw deep scratches on the tree next to the canoe. Very fresh, they were. In my opinion, he said the hotel, after two nights, would close down for the season. He had work to do. The guide agreed our time was up.  

In the countries I visited, Indians and locals fear jaguars. I do not doubt they have good reasons, but when man and cat accidentally meet it is about the way they interact. That, circumstances and something difficult to describe.

Here's a longish quote from an article written by Richard Sandomir in the New York Times of August 8, 2018: 

" ... Some years after persuading the government of Belize to set up the jaguar reserve, the Cockscomb Basin Wildlife Sanctuary, Dr. Rabinmowitz was walking trough it when he saw the tracks of a large male. He began to follow it until it was getting dark - and realized that it was lurking behind him.

Terrified, he thought to make himself small and untreathening. "So I squatted down and I was expecting the jaguar - hoping the jaguar - would just walk off. Although I loved watching it, I was also scared. And the jaguar just sat down. And he sits there on the trail, the trail I have to go back on. Sitting there, looking at me."

Still uncertain how to proceed, Dr. Rabinowitz stood and fell on his back, thinking he now was easy prey. "The jaguar let out kind of a guttural growl and stood up and walked towards the forest," he said. " And right before it went into the forest, it turned and it looked back at me for a few seconds and our eyes met. And I remember that look so clearly from the cages in the cat house at the Bronx Zoo" ... "  (New York Times, August 8, 2018).

The jaguar most probably had seen people before. Alan Rabinowitz was different from many others. Wild big cats have the eye. They know.

This photograph of a Sumatran tiger was first posted by Phatio:

*This image is copyright of its original author

   

2 - From The New York Times orbituary ('Alan Rabinowitz, Conservationist of Wild Cats, Dies at 64', August 8, 2018)

The article written by Richard Sandomir in the New York Times is outstanding. Here's another long quote about a few things you should know:

" ... Alan Robert Rabinowitz was born in Brooklyn on dec. 31, 1953. His father, Frank, was a high school physical education trainer, and his mother, Shirley (Felman) Rabinowitz, was a homemaker. His stutter led public schools in Far Rockaway, Queens, to put him into classes with children with Asperger's syndrome, dyslexia, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder and other conditions that other children around him often mocked. He underwent hypnosis and shock therapy and was given drugs.

"It made me realize that adults thought I was broken, so I gave up trying to communicate with them," he told Publishers Weekly in 2014. He added, "I have no memories of being able to speak without severe disfluency, and I remember a childhood filled with fear and pain."

He found relief when he was 18, at a clinic in upstate New York, where he learned to speak fluently. He graduated from Western Maryland ... in Westminster, Md., with a bachelor's degree in Biology and Chemistry.

At the University of Tennessee, where he studied black bears, raccoons and bats, he earned a master's and a Ph.D. He wrote his dissertation about the ecology of the raccoon in Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

Dr. Rabinowitz was a research fellow at the Wildlife Conservation Society when Dr. Schaller, who was a top executive there, suggested that he go to Belize to study jaguars.

"He had a vision for himself that he hadn't realized," Dr. Schaller said. "When you meet someone like that you have to give him a try."

That set Dr. Rabinowitz on a path of exploration and adventure, one that dealt with not only jaguars, lions and tigers. In northern Myanmar, for example, he discovered a previously unknown species of deer, the leaf muntjac, and in the Himalayas he met the last known Mongoloid pygmies in the world, called the Taron.

Recalling his meeting with one pygmy, Dr. Rabinowitz said he had communicated nonverbally with him.

"He started making gestures about young children, which I didn't quite understand at first," he said in a 2013 interview with the On Being Project, which focuses on subjects involving moral imagination and social courage. When he realized that the man had asked him why he had no children, Dr. Rabinowitz answered through a translator, "Why do you assume I have no children?"

The man replied, "Because you act like a man who still has this deep, deep hole inside of him."

The conversation led him to think differently about his family and to decide with his wife, Salisa Rabinowitz, to have children (He and Salisa Sathapanawath had met in Thailand, where Dr. Rabinowitz was giving a lecture at the university where she was attending. They married in Thailand in 1992. They had a daughter, Alana, and a son, Alexander ... "  (The New York Times, August 8, 2018).

3 - A voice for those unable to talk

As a child, Alan Rabinowitz suffered from a severe stutter. It had a devastating effect, resulting in isolation. It also had another result:

" ... There are two things that stutterers can do without stuttering: one is sing, and I could never sing. The other is speak to animals," Rabinowitz told U.S. comedian and TV host Stephen Colbert in an interview. "So coming home from school ... I would go into my closet and talk to animals like the chameleon, the green turtle, the gerbil, and I realized that animals don't have a voice. They're just like me. They can think, they have feelings, but they don't have voices. So at that particular point in my childhood as they were allowing me to pour my heart out to them, I made a promise to animals. I swore to them that if I ever found my voice and stopped stuttering, or if I could control my stuttering, I would be their voice. I would actually try to speak for them and save them ... "  (Mongabay.com, August 7, 2018 - 'Alan Rabinowitz, big cat evangelist and voice of the wild, dies at 64').

His father often took him to the Bronx Zoo. Young Alan found joy in talking to them as well, especially an old jaguar, who was wary and watchful: 

" ... I would sit and whisper to this jaguar, outpooring all my emotions", Dr. Rabinowitz said in an interview with Natural World Safaris, a tour operator, "and I promised that if one day day I found my voice I would become their voice ..."  (The New York Times, August 8, 2018).

Did he keep his promise? 

This is from an article dedicated to Dr. Alan Rabinowitz I found in the National Geographic of August 2018):

" ... He traveled the world studying jaguars, clouded leopards, Asiatic leopards, tigers, Sumatran rhinos, bears, leopard cats, raccoons, and civets. His work in Belize resulted in the world's first jaguar sanctuary (the Cockscomb Basin Wildlife Sanctuary). In Taiwan, his work helped establish the country's largest protected area and last piece of intact lowland forest. In Thailand, he generated the first field research on Indochinese tigers, Asiatic leopards, and leopard cats, in what ultimately became the region's first World Heritage Site. And in Myanmar, his work led to the creation of five new protected areas, as well as the discovery of the world's most primitive deer, the leaf deer, in the northern part of that country. He wrote more than 100 scientific and popular articles, as well as eight books, including a children's book entitled A Boy and A Jaguar ... "  (National Geographic, August, 2018).

Apart from all that, in 2006, he and his close friend Thomas S. Kaplan founded 'Panthera', a non-profit organisation dedicated to the conservation of the world's 40 wild cat species and the vast landscapes that hold them. He moved to Panthera full time in 2008.

4 - Quality

According to conservation biologist Thomas E. Lovejoy, a former director of the World Wildlife Fund-US program and a National Geographic Fellow, Alan Rabinowitz had the ability to think and act big. He also had an irascible impatience with organisational grandstanding:

" ... "When trying to save tigers, he came to the determination that the biggest problem with tiger conservation was tiger conservationists being more focused on the success of the organisation than the tigers themselves; it drove him crazy" said Steve Winter, a National Geographic photographer who worked with him. Rabinowitz, he said, was critical of organizations seemingly intent on having meetings, spending money, and having good PR.

He was quick to be critical, and he had a few rough edges in how he did things, but he never got confused about what was quality conservation and what was quality science, Lovejoy recalled ... "  (National Geographic, August, 2018). 

Red tape, vanity and countless combinations are seen everywhere all the time, but people like Dr. Alan Robert Rabinowitz are few and far between. When they go, you only see emptyness:

" ... In a tribute, Panthera co-founder Kaplan wrote that losing Rabinowitz was like losing a twin. "It is beyond mourning," he wrote ... "  (Mongabay, August 2018).

*This image is copyright of its original author

5 - Links, videos and photographs

The New York Times: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/08/obituaries/alan-rabinowitz-conservationist-of-wild-cats-dies-at-64.html
The Independent: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/alan-rabinowitz-zoologist-dead-conservationist-animals-jaguars-a8484291.html

Tribute (Panthera video): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7zCVVEEAp-E

Rabinowitz' work in Myanmar resulted in a number of new reserves. One of these was the Hukawng Reserve. At 21,890 sq. km., it's the largest tiger reserve in the world. Here's a photograph of Rabinowitz with Myanmar government officials in 2000 (Steve Winter, Phantera):

*This image is copyright of its original author

 

Most unfortunately, problems erupted in Myanmar. The video and the news report below say the reserve is going downhill rapidly:   

Hukawng Valley Tiger Reserve: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fj476RWIf7U
NewsRep: https://thenewsrep.com/106442/violence-in-myanmar-rises-tiger-population-plummets/

In Bhutan, the situation is very different. I knew about tigers in Bhutan, but was surprised at the number. I was, however, not surprised to find this picture:

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