On the ranches of Chiapas, in southeastern Mexico, where the roar of the jaguar (Panthera onca) used to herald livestock losses and provoke reprisals that sometimes ended with the feline’s death, things are beginning to change. A conservation program to promote coexistence between humans and predators is achieving positive results: electric fences that do not harm the animals, nighttime corrals, and environmental education workshops have significantly reduced attacks on livestock, while jaguars continue to roam most of the ranches where the program has been implemented, showing that sharing territory without lethal conflict is possible.
A study published in the journal Perspectives in Ecology and Conservation evaluated these measures, which, combined with direct work with ranchers, not only protect livestock but have also changed the producers’ perceptions: they now show greater acceptance of the jaguar and less willingness to kill it in revenge, offering evidence that coexistence between large predators and productive activities can be achieved through targeted interventions and collaboration with communities.
“The most common and immediate response to the question of how to address predation is no longer to kill the jaguar; there are other alternatives. We found that ranchers’ acceptance of jaguars has improved,” says biologist Antonio de la Torre, director of the organization Fund 4 Nature & Wildlife and a postdoctoral researcher at the Autonomous Metropolitan University in Lerma (UAM Lerma).
Jaguars remained present on 61% of the ranches where the program was implemented, as a result of the Jaguars of the Maya Forest Program. This initiative, coordinated by De la Torre through his organization and in collaboration with Natura Mexicana and Bioconciencia, seeks to strengthen local capacities to promote coexistence between communities and wildlife.
Twelve ejidos (communal landholdings) in the region signed jaguar conservation agreements, which include mechanisms for reporting attacks on livestock and protecting the species. This advance demonstrates that coexistence is not a fixed state, but a dynamic process that transforms conflict into long-term solutions, even in landscapes increasingly altered by human activity.
“The jaguar’s survival depends on finding spaces for coexistence in the landscapes that humans dominate and fragment by expanding our productive frontiers—agricultural, livestock, urban, and industrial—thus further reducing biodiversity habitat,” explains José Fernando González Maya, research professor and head of the Conservation Biology area in the Department of Environmental Sciences at UAM Lerma.
The study was conducted in the southern part of the Maya Forest, within the region known as the Lacandon Jungle, in Chiapas, one of Mexico’s most important tropical rainforest regions. There, the jaguar’s habitat faces increasing pressure from the expansion of livestock farming. In this shared landscape, jaguars roam both protected natural areas and communal lands, which has intensified encounters and conflicts with ranchers where the jungle and productive activities overlap.
In 2016, the “Jaguars of the Mayan Jungle” program was launched, initially to assess the jaguar’s conservation status. However, between 2021 and 2024, the project expanded its reach to cattle ranches, implementing training for producers, measures to prevent predation, community monitoring of jaguars and their prey, environmental education activities, and informational talks. The strategy sought to combine practical tools with collaborative work with communities, protecting the jaguar without affecting local livelihoods.
“The turning point was realizing that it wasn’t enough to investigate the species—how many there are, how they move, how they reproduce—but that we also had to find solutions for the jaguar to persist in these landscapes,” explains De la Torre. This led to the conflict mitigation program, after observing that in many communities the solution to predation was to kill the jaguars, likely including some of the individuals they were monitoring in the area.
It all began by asking questions of the ranchers. The researchers’ objective was to understand how they perceived the jaguar before starting the project, so they conducted 100 interviews between March and May 2022 in eight ejidos (communal landholdings) in the region. The questionnaire explored topics such as the economic impact of predation, livestock management, knowledge about the species, and the value that the producers place on wildlife.
Then the mitigation efforts began. The pilot ranches invested an average of $943 to implement measures such as electric fences and nighttime corrals. The energizers for electric fences have an output voltage of 10-13 kV, similar to those commonly used for managing cattle and sheep. “The shock doesn’t harm the animals, but it does act as a deterrent to keep them from entering the pastures where we want to protect the livestock,” explained De la Torre.
Eight of the pilot ranches adopted changes in livestock management, ranging from adjustments to feeding to the implementation of vaccination and deworming schedules—practices that the producers incorporated after a series of project workshops.
“For ranchers, the comparison is simple: if you raise cattle, how much does an electric fence cost you in terms of calves you could sell? It’s not actually that big an investment: the materials and construction cost between 20,000 and 25,000 pesos, roughly the price of selling two calves. If you make that investment and the materials last about 10 years, then the cost-benefit ratio is quite high because it will help you have fewer financial losses in the future,” explains De la Torre.
Monitoring on the pilot ranches showed that, after this intervention, jaguar attacks on cattle were significantly reduced. The few cases recorded occurred outside protected areas or when the animals had not been secured. With these actions, each ranch avoided losses of more than $1,500 per year, resulting in a favorable cost-benefit ratio.
To test the effectiveness of the measures, the team made bimonthly visits to the ranches, where they recorded new cases of predation and checked the condition of the barriers installed to deter jaguars. At the same time, they installed 19 camera traps on 13 ranches and their surrounding areas and conducted patrols to detect wildlife tracks. With the support of trained local residents, they selected the locations with the highest probability of capturing images of the felines and other predators in this mosaic of jungle and pastureland.
“We developed an environmental education program in the schools of the communities where we work, in addition to outreach talks for the ejidos (communal landholdings). We also implemented a participatory monitoring program focused on jaguars,” explains De la Torre.
The monitoring documented that jaguars were still present on most of the pilot ranches. In total, they were detected on eight of the 13 ranches—61%—using camera traps and tracking footprints. In six ranches, specimens were directly recorded using cameras, while in two ranches, their presence was confirmed by tracks found along transects.
More than a year later, in September 2023, the team re-interviewed the same participants to assess whether the interventions had changed their perception and how they interacted with the feline. This second round allowed for a comparison of responses.
Source: mongabay
