Warner Glenn’s hunting dogs are his eyes and ears on the Arizona borderlands.
And mules are how he gets around
when he goes off-road to track mountain lions
that feed on ranchers’ cattle.
In these canyons,
Glenn is used to finding bear, puma, and deer.
But one day, while hunting for mountain lion,
he found something else.
— So this is March 7th, 1996.
— So, Warner, this is the area where you first spotted that jaguar, huh?
— Jaguars once roamed all over North America.
But after a century of shooting, poisoning, and trapping,
they were presumed extinct in this country.
That is, until that day in 1996
when Glenn snapped a few photos.
— You think we’re gonna see ourselves any jaguars today?
— But there’s a new threat to the jaguar in southern Arizona:
President Trump’s call for a border wall.
And though Glenn is everything Trump could want in a voter—
a hunter, an NRA member, and opponent of illegal immigration—
he hates the wall.
— Right now, much of the Arizona border has a type of wall that jaguars can get through.
It’s meant to stop vehicles,
but people and animals can all pass freely.
Trump’s wall, though, wouldn’t let people through—
jaguars either.
That’s a problem, because all jaguars in the U.S.
get there by crossing the Arizona border.
The Jaguars are born some 200 miles south, in the northern Mexican jungle.
At 18 months, male cats start searching for new territory.
Sometimes, that takes them north.
— And here’s one of my murals right here.
This is one of the ones I did on my own.
— The Northern Jaguar Project in Sonora is trying to protect the endangered animal
by changing attitudes toward it.
— I very purposely picked this jaguar because
he’s looking down and into the wash,
like, he’s continuing this way towards the river,
and by doing that, it really
takes away any feeling of aggression or anything,
because he’s not looking at you.
— Randy Young is a man of big gestures.
When he fell for the jaguar,
he moved down to Mexico to get closer to them.
He’s painted four large murals of his obsessions.
Young is the Northern Jaguar Project’s wildlife reserve manager.
— Ever since I got to town, I decided that I’m basically an ambassador for the jaguar.
— The Project purchased cattle ranches to create the reserve.
To discourage visitors, they let the grass grow long.
Potholes swallow the roads.
Rockslides are constant.
They like it that way:
As the land returns to the wild,
the Jaguars have, too.
— Woah, we have got some serious flow going on here.
Wow.
I never see this much water here.
But I’m gonna say we can go ahead and push through it.
— Neglect is a strategy, and sometimes it works too well.
— Oh shit!
We died, we’re screwed.
— Okay, what you wanna do now?
— I’m gonna go get the tractor.
I’m gonna be a little while.
— The land is difficult for vehicles,
but for carnivores, cattle, and cattle ranchers,
it’s ideal.
— Part of Young’s job is to check-in on neighboring ranchers like Marty Monje,
whose family has worked this area for generations.
Young tries to convince them that jaguars belong on their land.
— The Project has installed wildlife trap cameras on ranches and on the reserve
to try and capture photos of the jaguar.
They pay 5,000 pesos per photo.
Young says that’s what the cats fetch on the thriving black market
for their teeth and their bones.
Young now spends his time hunting for Jaguar photos.
It’s fitting, because it was Warner Glenn’s picture in 1996 that really led him here.
— What did it feel like the first time you heard that the jaguar had been confirmed in the U.S.?
— Well, it was in mountain ranges that I had just been playing in recently.
So it was very inspirational and very much raised the level of wild of that place I had just been in,
in my own mind.
It changed my own landscape that I lived in.
— How do you feel about the jaguar as a species?
— I get emotional when I talk about the jaguar
because I’ve basically dedicated my life to this.
Because I do feel like we are in that apocalyptic moment, you know?
We are on that cutting edge of…
we’re losing all these species right now.
And we have the ability to change that.
Each and every one of us.
But if we don’t step up, it’s not going to change.