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Business News/ Mint-lounge / Features/  My jaguar Tequila
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My jaguar Tequila

The miracle of being let into the life of a revered predator and watching her grow

The author with Tequila the jaguar. Photo: Jurg OlsenPremium
The author with Tequila the jaguar. Photo: Jurg Olsen

She was all of two months when I first met her. Mischievous, affectionate and simply too beautiful to describe. She had me at hello. Her name was Tequila. Fate named her for my favourite drink and like the drink, nothing gave me a better high.

She was not mine. Her human family were dear friends of mine and I was lucky enough to have met them while making a short documentary on South Africa’s deplorable canned hunting farms.

Tequila is a jaguar. Her parents Inca and Amazon came as adults to my friends who run a predator sanctuary called Jukani. Karen and Jurg Olsen live and breathe endangered cats and try their best to rescue ones that need help and give them lifetime care. They do not breed their cats and also do not allow the general public to pet cubs like in many places in South Africa. To prevent breeding, all the cats in Jukani are on birth control. Sometimes accidents happen and Tequila was a happy accident. Tequila’s mother, having been born in captivity in a zoo, had been taken away from her mother as a cub and as a result had no idea how to bring Tequila up. She nearly killed baby Tequila by abandoning her. So the Olsens stepped in and hand-reared her in their house. It was at this time that I got to know them.

Tequila grew up with about 20 domestic cats. She would watch me play with the other cats and so decided to trust me with herself too. I would go over to stay almost every other month with the Olsens for a few days and this continuity of being around her allowed us to build a lovely bond. Rambunctious like all cubs at her age, I have several interesting teeth mark designs on my arms and legs. Many have faded with time but one rather deeper scratch on my lower back I wear with great honour.

Even at a few months old, it could never be forgotten that Tequila is a product of tens of thousands of years of wild evolution designed to create a perfect apex predator; and that although a third generation captive-born cat, captivity was just a blink on the surface. As she grew older, she was moved out of the house to the enclosed garden in the back. This was done to prevent her from suddenly realizing that she could take out the domestic cats for a snack. To make up for it, she was given a stuffed teddy bear, that she carried everywhere with her. Even now, though she is a fully mature female jaguar of five years living in a huge enclosure, she has that ratty teddy. Everything else she comes into contact with is reduced to its bare stuffings.

The jaguar is one of the fiercest predators in the wild. It is the third largest big cat in the world after the tiger and the lion. Although it looks like a leopard, its closest in behaviour to the tiger. Found from the south-west US to Mexico and down through South America, the jaguar has lost close to 40% of its home range in the wild. They are ambush stalkers, unbelievably agile even in the rain forest canopy and equally at home in water. While most cats go for the jugular, the jaguar crushes skulls. These skills are instinctive and one of the more important reasons for not having big cats as pets or treating them as such. It must always be kept in mind that at any minute they can rip your throat out or crush your skull no matter that they were hand-reared.

I had to respect Tequila for the predator she is and deal with her on her terms. If she was not amenable to a visit, you did not go in. If she walked away from you, you did not follow. If she curled her upper lip even slightly, you left immediately. It was always on her invitation I was allowed into her space. My favourite time with her was in the afternoons when she was a bit snoozy and liked to lean against me and sleep. One afternoon, as she lay on my lap and I traced the delicate whorls and patterns on her rich and luxurious fur—fur for which jaguars are poached—I recalled an old Aztec story. In the story, the patterns on the jaguar’s body outlined the pattern of the stars in heaven.

By this time she was over two years old and it was a miracle to be let into her life. Usually adult jaguars are not friendly even if captive and hand-reared, but her personality was different. From her I learnt that while a species-based knowledge is important, these animals are individuals too, each with their own way of being, wild or captive. Sitting there that afternoon sinking my hands into the black and gold, it was the closest I felt to a mystical higher power, a deep connection with my own wild self, the human-animal that I am, a time when I would have been a part of nature and not apart from it. It made me marvel, that in the days when humans would have lived as hunter gatherers, indeed as many tribes still do deep in the jungles of South America, big cats were our most formidable adversaries and the most revered. To have a representative of that pure wildness allow me to call her my friend is still the greatest gift ever.

Tequila loved lolling in her pool, chicken bits, and gentle grooming. She liked loud kisses on her nose, her ears being rubbed gently and did not like us going near her tail. Even when I did not visit for over three months sometimes, the minute I came, she would come over and press against her gate making small mewing sounds in greeting. Looking into those extraordinary green-gold eyes I would see a gentle welcome. Then there were times when she would turn her head at a certain angle, dip her neck and give you a look that was pure jaguar, and I would feel both the visceral pull of instinctive human fear to a dangerous thing with teeth and claws, and the other part of the human brain that seeks a deep connection with the wildness we have lost.

Just after she turned 3, the Jukani sanctuary moved to a larger area, where the cat enclosures tripled in size. She moved into one such space. Perhaps the size of the space and the wilderness triggered her deeper predatory instincts. I cannot go in with her any more and I don’t try. This does not and has never upset me. I feel the same satisfaction and love just looking at her. She still comes up to rub against the fence to say hello when she sees me but in her green-gold eyes I no longer see the welcome to go in and play with her.

To me this is not a loss but a beautiful moment of watching something so wildly precious reclaim a bit of that lost wild heart.

Swati Thiyagarajan is senior environment correspondent for NDTV and is currently writing a book based on her conservation and wildlife TV series Born Wild.

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Published: 05 Jun 2015, 10:20 PM IST
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