CORUMBA DE GOIAS: At a big cat sanctuary in Brazil, a veterinarian carefully bandages the wounds of a jaguar caught in wildfires raging in the world’s largest tropical wetland. While the animal is expected to recover, her home in the Pantanal continues to burn. The Pantanal, south of the Amazon in the state of Mato Grosso do Sul, has the highest density of jaguars in the world. It is also home to millions of caimans, parrots and giant otters. Brazil has been parched by a historic drought that experts have linked to climate change, sparking what authorities have called a “pandemic of fires”. So far this year, about 6.7 million hectares (16.6 million acres) have burned in the Brazilian Amazon, representing 1.6 percent of the rainforest. Fires are also spreading in the Pantanal, a United Nations World Heritage Site, where 1,452 fires have been recorded so far in September – nearly four times the number recorded in September 2023, according to the National Institute for Space Research. Pollyanna Motinha, a veterinarian at the Nex NoExtinction shelter in suburban Brasilia, says she’s increasingly seeing animals “at the top of the food chain, like jaguars” injured in fires. “It didn’t happen often in the past,” she told AFP. The jaguar, the largest feline in the Americas, is listed as a “near threatened” species by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. Found on the banks of the Paraguay River, the Pantanal jaguar weighs an average of 100 kilograms (220 pounds). Fewer than 2,000 are estimated to remain in the region. The jaguar, named Itapira, was found hidden in a waste pipe near the town of Miranda, an area hit hard by the flames. All four of her paws were burned. The two-year-old, 57-kilogram cat needs to be approached with care despite her injuries. Before treatment, she is sedated with anesthetic arrows. Motinha, her husband and fellow veterinarian Thiago Luczinski, and two students then clean her wounds and wrap her paws in bags to apply ozone, which works as a disinfectant as well as a medicine. After a month of almost daily care, Itapiro’s condition improved. In the wild, her burns prevented her from using her claws to hunt caimans and capybaras, a large semi-aquatic rodent native to South America. “If she hadn’t been brought here, if she had stayed in the wild, she probably wouldn’t be alive or in deplorable condition,” Luczinski said. But breeders are worried about the future of the jaguar. “This animal is safe today but will return to an area that is still burning,” he said. Another female jaguar, which suffered burns in the previous large wave of fires in the Pantanal in 2020, was unable to return home from Brazil. Her legs were so badly burned that she lost the tendons that move her claws, explained Silvano Gianni, co-founder of Nex NoExtinction. She had two cubs in captivity – one of them will be released back into the wild.
