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Listener supported. WNYC Studios. Wait, you're listening? Okay. Alright. Okay. Alright. You're listening to Radiolab. Radiolab. Radiolab. From WNYC. See? Yep. Hey there. Lulu here. Wow. Wow.
I'm meowing because we have got a story today about a cat. The biggest of the big cats found in the Americas, clocking in at over 300 pounds, the jaguar. They look like super muscly, hulked up cheetahs to me. They are beautiful creatures and
And we've got a story about one today. And it's also the story about a boy, a boy much smaller than the jaguar, nowhere near as ferocious, who made a promise to a jaguar. And making that promise changed, in a very real way, the little boy's life. That little boy is named Alan, Alan Rabinowitz. And we are going to hear his story right now. I'll kick it off to hosts Robert Krowich and Jad Abumrad.
Okay, I'm Alan Rabinowitz. I'm the head of a program that seeks to explore the Earth's last great wild areas and try to protect them. Alan Rabinowitz is a renowned animal conservationist. He's set up wildlife preserves all over the world...
And Jed, like you, he's not particularly thrilled by zoos. Although, without a zoo, and I'm thinking of the Bronx Zoo in particular, he wouldn't be who he is today. Because when Alan was very young, very young, he had a terrible stutter. Oh, I couldn't talk. My body would spasm. So if you wanted to say, coming my... See, coming's a hard contact.
Coming is the tongue against the upper palate. So you couldn't get the word out? I didn't speak a fluent sentence to another human being until I went to this, finally, this clinic when I was a senior in college. A senior in college? Yeah. I never went on a date. I never kissed a girl other than my mom. How do you connect to anybody? I didn't connect to anybody. I had no friends. None? That's how I, none. I had little animals.
that I would take into the closet with me and I would talk to them fluently. And that's how it was for Alan. For much of his childhood, the only time he says he could free his tongue to talk was in the dark with his pets.
Green turtles, hamsters, and gerbils, and chameleons, which would all die. I would talk the way we're talking. Really? I could talk fluently to the animals. And his father one time overheard him talking in the dark. He thought, well, maybe we should take this boy to the zoo. To the Bronx Zoo. To the Bronx Zoo. He used to bring me to the old great cat house.
Horrendous. You remember the gray cat house? It was classic, old, concrete floors. But you'd go in. I mean, talk about an experience. You'd walk in and hear growling, roaring. I mean, it sounded incredible. Raw power. And he loved being there. He just loved it. All those noises of like 20 cats all together vocalizing at the same time.
Maybe it was the sound which appealed to me as a kid that couldn't speak. And once again, in front of the zoo cats? Because if he was alone, he could talk. Yes, my father, it's funny, because he knew I talked to the animals, so he would stand back. He knew if he came too close, I'd stop because I would stutter because he was there. But if he wasn't, you could talk more fluently. I could talk fluently. And there was one old jaguar. Oh!
And I remember as a kid, I would stand there and I would watch this magnificent, huge, strong beast. This massive, strong animal had blank eyes. It just looked blank and it was pacing back and forth and back and forth. I felt this animal was like me because I felt strong, I felt good, I felt powerful inside, but yet I was trapped inside this cage of my body. And that's when Alan remembers turning to that cat as a kind of fellow exile
and whispering a promise. That I would try to find a place for us. I remember that. I remember saying once, I'll find a place for us. And I didn't mean that particular, I don't know what I mean. I mean, I can't really look back and know exactly what I meant. But I felt no matter what, I would find a place for us. We'll be back in a moment. Hello parents, homeschoolers, and teachers. Trusty narrator here from the Who's Smarted podcast. Our 15-minute episodes are perfect for
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All right, we're back. On with the story. And that promise... I would find a place for us. He kept that promise in his head for two decades. He went on to visit a speech therapist. He learned how to use his mouth and tongue to get past his stutter. Not completely, but enough to finish college and then to go on to graduate school and study wildlife ecology. And it was at his graduation party from graduate school that he got the offer that would change his life. At my going-away party...
My major professor asked me if I wanted to go to Belize and study jaguars. Not just study them, count them. An objective survey of how many jaguars are really in the country. Alan asked, how do you count jaguars? And that's when the professor said, well, you've got to catch them.
Catch a jaguar? How do I know? I had no idea. It's like saying, go catch a dragon. Everybody knew that jaguars are stealthy, almost ghost-like cats in a forest. Nobody had ever captured jaguars in the rainforest. But that was exactly what the professor was proposing. Go to a little country in Central America. Please. Go deep into its jungle, collar as many jaguars as you can so that we can track them and learn about them.
Weeks pass, and picture Alan on the edge of the jungle in Belize with absolutely no idea what to do next. We opened a map of Belize. It had one dirt road down the entire country. Alan figures the only way he's going to catch a jaguar is to talk to people who hunt jaguars. Now, they're there. He calls them Mayans, and they live in the forest. And I went to the hunters, and they told me, run them with dogs.
And one hunter still had jaguar dogs. And I'll tell you, of everything I have ever done in my life, I still rank that as the absolute hardest. Because when these dogs get on a jaguar scent,
It's a bloodlust. You're running full speed through the jungle. The Mayans are in front of us, running and chopping at the same time. And I knew in my mind that there were poisonous snakes, but you can't think about it because you don't have time to look where you're running or your feet. And one time, dashing behind dogs and machete-waving hunters, disaster struck. They were just about to actually tree a jaguar when one of the crew got bit by a poisonous snake.
So everybody quit. Nobody had worked for me. They all thought I was jinxed. So then I had to figure out how to capture jaguars by myself. Nobody worked for me. Finally, one Mayan Indian came to work for me, and we ended up building traps. And I would put live pigs, because they didn't want dead meat. They would want live meat, which they could kill themselves. So I put live pigs in the back of these traps, and I'd have to go feed the pigs every single day. The first trap I built, I built it out of two-by-fours.
I caught a jaguar, and the jaguar chewed its way through the two-by-four door and busted its way out of the two-by-fours. Whoa. I mean, they are powerful animals. But one good thing came out of this experience. He learned to build a better trap. And so, cat by cat by cat, Alan was able to count the jaguars in that forest, and there were thousands of them. But he had the sense that they were in real danger because around them, people were cutting down their forest. And if the forest went down,
the Jaguars go to. So that's when he began the campaign, which eventually led him to the prime minister. I was given a chance, and not only did the prime minister agree to meet me, but he invited me to address him in the whole cabinet.
but only 15 minutes. Now remember, this is a guy who for two whole decades could barely speak. His stutter, which is now less of a problem, was still there. And now he's being asked to address a prime minister and a cabinet in a high-pressure, make-it-or-break-it, 15-minutes-or-bust situation. I knew I couldn't stutter. I mean, I only had 15 minutes. I said, look, you will lose nothing by this if you don't protect it
guaranteed it's going to be gone because the citrus people want it for both timber and citrus. Make it a forest reserve and make it tentative. Make it a five-year agreement. If I can't prove to you I can bring in outside money in five years, what do you have to lose? And if it works, you've got a jaguar preserve.
You have the world's first Jaguar preserve. Now, his pitch was supposed to last 15 minutes. That's the time he was allotted, but he went way over there. I ended up staying in there an hour and a half. And the vote was a tie in the cabinet. The prime minister himself broke the tie in Allen's favor. And by the end, he agreed. The prime minister voted in my favor. That made it. It got great press as the world's first Jaguar preserve. To this day, it's the world's only area designated specifically as a Jaguar preserve.
And by the way, the whole time with the Prime Minister and all, that whole time, he never stuttered.
So, Alan decided his work was more or less done. He could go home now to New York. And just before he left, he decided to go for one last walk in the jungle, a last visit. He wasn't looking for jaguars. He wasn't expecting to see one. This was his goodbye. But when he was looking down at the ground as he walked along, suddenly he thought, well, hello, because there on the ground, right in front of him, was a fresh print of a jaguar.
A big one. Bigger than any I had seen in that area. And that just got my blood going. So I started following it. You almost never, never see a jaguar when you follow its tracks because it knows you're there. I mean, I was hoping against hope that maybe I'd see the jaguar, but actually I didn't think I would because they always knew I was coming and they'd always go away. And then it started getting dark. It started getting late and I didn't want to be in the jungle at night. I didn't have a flashlight or anything.
So that's when I turned around and there was the jaguar about 15 feet away. Behind you? It was behind me. It had been behind me probably quite a ways. So it knew that you were tracking it and it decided to find out who you were. It had circled around and it probably cut off into the forest, watched me as I passed.
Then got back on the trail and just stayed back a good ways. And it was pretty clear this cat had been creeping closer and closer. To where by the time I turned around, it had shortened its distance between us really small. So it was in leaping distance? I couldn't have gotten away from it. And I knew that. So I did what I thought was the right thing, which is make myself small, make myself subdominant, just crouch down.
And then the jaguar did something which I didn't expect it to do. It sat down. That was strange to me. And then I got scared. And I stood up and I stepped back because I felt the distance was too close now. That it didn't like. And all this time, I mean, I'm totally aware. I have no place to go. And with no place to go, nowhere to run, Alan just stood there, frozen in place. And the jaguar rose and it too just stood absolutely silent.
Then it just turned, started walking off into the jungle. And before it disappeared into the brush, it turned back to look at me. Then I really looked it in the eyes and they were wild eyes. There was fire in the jaguar's eyes. The last thing I remember very clearly is looking into its eyes and thinking of seeing the jaguar in the Bronx Zoo as a child, but seeing the wildness in this animal's eyes
It didn't look anything like that cat in the cage. It showed strength and freedom. We had just protected this incredible area, which now would be its home. And I remember telling the cat at one point that I'd find a place for us.
Dr. Alan Rabinowitz is the director for science and exploration at the Wildlife Conservation Society. And if you want to read more about his jaguar adventures in Belize, the book is called Jaguar, One Man's Struggle to Establish the World's First Jaguar Preserve. That'll do it for today. Thanks so much for listening. More stories about this lumpy, spotted planet of ours in two weeks.
First message. Radio Lab is produced by Jad Abumrad, Ellen Horn, Senior Producer, Lulu Miller, Assistant Producer, Production Executive, Dean Capello, Production Support by Sarah Pellegrini, Brett Beyer, Scott Goldberg, Alaska Keyville, Sam Leviander, Avian Mitra,
Ryan Scammell and Jacob Weinberg. Also, very special thanks to Tamar Lewin and Amy Bush's class at North Star Academy for their musical contributions.
Hi, I'm Emma, and I live in Portland, Maine. Here are the staff credits. Radiolab was created by Jad Abumrad and is edited by Soren Wheeler. Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser are our co-hosts. Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design. Our staff includes Simon Adler, Jeremy Bloom, Becca Bressler, W. Harry Fortuna, David Gable, Maria Paz Gutierrez, Sindhu Jnanasambandam, Matt Kielty,
Annie McEwen, Alex Neeson, Valentina Powers, Sara Khari, Sarah Sandbach, Arianne Wack, Pat Walters, and Molly Webster. Our fact checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger, and Natalie Middleton. Hey, Alex, how many teeth do coyotes have? Uh, I don't know. Well, do you know how high a coquifrog can jump?
I don't even know what those are. Dang. What about, okay, camels? Do you know anything about camels? Not really, but that's what badger questions are for. Right. One of our favorite segments of Terrestrials is where we all stop talking and the badgers, a.k.a. the kids with badgering questions, get to ask our experts everything they're dying to know. And we need some of those for our upcoming episodes. We're looking for questions about coyotes, rats, coquifrogs, camels, and farts. Farts.
Email us a voice recording of your question along with your name, age, location, and you just might hear your badgering voice on an upcoming episode of Terrestrials. And where can they send those, Alan? Terrestrials at WNYC.org. That's T-E-R-R-E-S-T-R-I-A-L-S at WNYC.org.