Forest Department Installs Surveillance Cameras off Boom Road to Detect Problem Jaguars’ Movements
On Wednesday, we brought you the story of Reina Garcia and her family who are losing pets and livestock to what she says are problem jaguars roaming in the area of the Boom/Hattieville Road. Garcia told us that they have been living at the location for over twenty years and the problem never presented itself until last November when she lost her first sheep, then a dog and now on Tuesday morning before dawn, another sheep. The mother called out News Five to share with us her fear that if nothing is done about the roaming jaguars, their other pets and livestock are in danger, and so are their children’s lives. We passed on the family concerns to the Forest Department, which deployed a team to the area today. This evening, Deputy Chief Forest Officer, John Pinelo Junior told us how they are going to address the situation.
John Pinelo Jr.
John Pinelo Jr., Deputy Chief Forest Officer
“Our protocol is basically, we go in and try and identify what is killing the animal. We assess it and try and do a capture if it is necessary and then a relocation. So basically what we’re doing right now is our guys have set up cameras to see if we can identify what is killing the animals – the sheep. She said it look like a jaguar, but we have to make sure we can identify what it is. Once we do, then we will make a decision whether it is necessary to relocate the animal. While we understand that she has lost an animal, we have to also understand that they live in areas where jaguars actually occur naturally. This is in an area near where we call the Central Biological Corridor, which is basically, as the name suggests, a corridor for animals to be able to travel around and go up and down within different forest reserves and different protected areas in the country. Now if you have livestock roaming around freely, they are subject to being attacked and I think this is the situation that is happening. We have also suggested to Ms Reina that they build a little corral to keep the sheep in the evening, which she started doing today. 0Our guys will go back and check on them to see if we can identify whether it’s a jaguar, and if it is, we try and identify which one it is because there might be multiple jaguars roaming around and we don’t want to catch the wrong jaguar and relocate one and the problem still exists. While I understand the concern about the kids, we’ve never had an incident in this country where a child was attacked by a jaguar. Jaguars aren’t that big that they target humans. It’s not like a tiger that weighs four hundred and fifty or five hundred pounds. But it is a concern and yes we’re concerned about it, which is why we reacted immediately. I will ask the public that if they do have these types of issues to call the Fore Department at eight, two, two, one, five, two, four or eight, two, two, two, zero, seven, nine. If we don’t know about the issues then we can’t respond to them. It’s not because we’re not doing the work but if we don’t know about it then we can’t go and respond.”
Those numbers to call again are: eight, two, two, one, five, two, four or eight, two, two, two, zero, seven, nine.
