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At a shelter for big cats in Brazil, a vet gingerly dresses wounds on a jaguar that was caught in wildfires raging in the world’s largest tropical wetland.<\/p>\n
While the animal is expected to heal, her home in the Pantanal continues to burn.<\/p>\n
The Pantanal, south of the Amazon in Mato Grosso do Sul state, has the world’s highest density of jaguars. It is also home to millions of caimans,\u00a0parrots and giant otters.<\/p>\n
Brazil has been parched by a historic drought that experts link to climate change and which has sparked what authorities have called a “fire pandemic.” So far this year, some 6.7 million hectares (16.6 million acres) have burned in the Brazilian Amazon, amounting to 1.6 percent of the rainforest.<\/p>\n
The fires are also ripping through the Pantanal, a UN World Heritage site which has recorded 1,452 fire outbreaks so far in September — almost four times the number recorded in September 2023, according to the National Institute for Space Research.<\/p>\n
Pollyanna Motinha, a vet at the Nex NoExtinction shelter on the outskirts of Brasilia, says she is increasingly seeing animals “at the top of the food chain, like jaguars” being injured in wildfires.<\/p>\n
“It’s not something that happened often in the past,” she told AFP.<\/p>\n
The jaguar, the largest feline in the Americas, is listed as a “near threatened” species by the International Union for Conservation of Nature.<\/p>\n
The Pantanal jaguar, which is found along the banks of the Paraguay River, weighs on average 100 kilograms (220 pounds).<\/p>\n
It is estimated that there are fewer than 2,000 left in the region.<\/p>\n
The jaguar named Itapira was found hiding in a drainpipe near the town of Miranda, an area badly hit by flames. All four of her paws had been burned.<\/p>\n
Despite her injuries the two-year-old, 57-kilogram cat must be approached with caution.<\/p>\n
Before being treated, she is sedated with anesthetic darts.<\/p>\n
Motinha, her husband and fellow vet Thiago Luczinski and two students then clean her wounds and wrap her paws in bags to apply ozone, which acts as a disinfectant, as well as a healing agent.<\/p>\n
After a month of almost daily care, Itapira’s condition has improved.<\/p>\n
In the wild, the burns prevented her from using her claws to hunt caimans and capybaras — a large semi-aquatic rodent native to South America.<\/p>\n
“If she had not been brought here, if she had remained in the wild, she would probably no longer be alive or would be in a deplorable state,” Luczinski said.<\/p>\n
But the caregivers worry about the jaguar’s future.<\/p>\n
“This animal is safe today but she is going to return to a region that is still burning,” he said.<\/p>\n
Another female jaguar who suffered burns in a previous major wave of fires in the Pantanal in 2020 was unable to return home from Brasilia.<\/p>\n
Her legs were so badly burned she lost the tendons that move her claws, Silvano Gianni, co-founder of Nex NoExtinction, explained.<\/p>\n
She went on to have two cubs in captivity — one of whom will be reintroduced to the wild.<\/p>\n
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