Zoos, Circuses, Safaris: A Gallery of Captivity

[peter]

(Yesterday, 07:11 AM)epaiva Wrote:

(Yesterday, 04:57 AM)peter Wrote:

(Yesterday, 02:23 AM)epaiva Wrote: Female Jaguar in Parque del Este, Caracas, Venezuela 

*This image is copyright of its original author

*This image is copyright of its original author

EPAIVA

If this is a female, one starts to wonder about the size of an adult male jaguar. Splendid animal. Any jaguar research going on in Venezuela?

PETER
She is a female from Los Llanos, in that region they are very large second in size only to the ones in El Pantanal. In the good old days they were as large as the ones from El Pantanal, sadly they were over hunted and their numbers are low today. I don’t think they are doing a research on them this days, situation in Venezuela is not good but I think next year everything will change for good in Venezuela.

Sorry about the capitals, my friend. It's an old habit. I think about Venezuela every now and then. Wanted to go there when I had a girlfriend from Suriname a few decades ago, but it didn't happen. In Suriname, I visited a man who caught, and sold, wild animals. He graduated in Berlin (Germany) during World War Two (...). Not someone you want to meet out in the jungle, but he knew about wild animals. 

The jaguars he had, although adult, were quite small. I read a few books that had good information about jaguars and pumas shot in Suriname in the days it still was a Dutch colony. I saw some of the skulls described in these books in the Naturalis Museum in Leiden and the former Zoological Museum of the Artis Zoo in Amsterdam. They were bigger than I thought, but I later found jaguars have relatively large and robust skulls.

The largest jaguar I saw was a circus male. His trainer said he was interested in an interview, but he declined when I arrived. He told me he was done with the jaguar, an immense melanistic male. The trainer had worked with big cats and bears, but apparently underestimated the jaguar. He said they were very strong-willed and dangerous. It had an effect on him. I later heard he quit a few days after I visited him. The jaguar was sent to a zoo I later visited. The keeper told me he kept his distance from the male. The vet of the zoo confirmed captive jaguars had a bad reputation in European zoos. I know of different cases of females killed by males, but this is quite common in captive lions and, in particular, tigers.   

Every now and then, a photograph of a giant jaguar caught (or shot) in Suriname pops up. Strange considering the average size of a Surinam jaguar. Anything known about migration patterns? For a jaguar, the distance between Suriname and Venezuela seems to be quite in reach. Reply