Sanctuary in São Paulo rescues pumas threatened by urbanization

Anesthetized on a stretcher, with a deep cut running through her raw hip, the puma Barreiro appears harmless: she waits for veterinarians to treat her so she can return to her habitat on the outskirts of São Paulo.

With nine wild species, Brazil has the greatest feline diversity in the world. All of them are at risk of extinction in the country due to human action.

A few dozen kilometers from São Paulo, the puma of the Atlantic Forest – the Brazilian biome with the most threatened fauna – is exposed to accelerated urban expansion in its habitat.

Here, the species faces unnatural dangers: being run over, electrocuted, fires, traps, poisoning, hunters.

Barreiro, a five-year-old male named after the neighborhood where he was found, was trapped in a trap possibly designed to prevent predators.

He was rescued in May by Mata Ciliar, an NGO that has a sanctuary to rehabilitate wild animals 90 kilometers from São Paulo.

“Due to urbanization in its habitat, when the jaguar goes out to look for territory, it gets lost among highways, gated communities and other human interventions,” explains Jorge Bellix, president of the organization, which has already helped 32,000 animals in almost three decades of work.

“Or even worse: it gets too close to human occupations, and that’s where the problems begin,” adds this agricultural engineer, who warns that “if it continues like this, unfortunately we will see the end of many species in just a few years.”

– Environmental invasion –

São Paulo has 12 million inhabitants – which rises to 21 million if you include its metropolitan area. But just a few kilometers away from the city you will find yourself in an environment of dense forest, mountainous geography and high humidity.

On the side of the highway that leads to the sanctuary, in the municipality of Jundiaí, it is possible to see how the walls and buildings of residential condominiums and shopping centers appear without any apparent order, like a white and gray eruption amidst the dense Atlantic vegetation.

A territorial animal, a puma like Barreiro does not abandon its area of ​​dominance once it has established it. An adult male can cover several dozen square kilometers.

When humans invade their space, which affects their food chain, the jaguar tries to expand its territory: it adapts to survive. In this search, Barreiro fell into a trap.

“We found him in the worst possible condition, trapped in a steel cable, and we had to anesthetize him from a distance to get him out of there,” says veterinarian Cristina Harumi, who participated in the rescue, while suturing the wound opened by the jaguar trying to escape in the surgical center.

Currently, 25 jaguars and ten jaguars are recovering at the Brazilian Center for the Conservation of Neotropical Felines of the Riparian Forest, on land with an area equivalent to 40 football fields, where monkeys, wild dogs, maned wolves, ocelots and other animals from the region are also being rehabilitated.

– “Losing the war” –

“The situation is very critical: in São Paulo, animals are losing the war against urbanization,” laments Harumi, although he hopes to see Barreiro free again within approximately three months.

The conservation center also houses jaguars, which are rare in the Atlantic Forest, although common in the illegal animal trafficking that flows from the North of the country to the state of São Paulo.

With its nine species, “Brazil has the greatest diversity of felines in the world”, according to Mata Ciliar, which warns that all of them “are included in the list of wild animals at risk of extinction”.

At the top of the food chain, the puma acts as a “bioindicator”: its survival shows that an environment is suitable for stable life. Its disappearance would indicate the opposite.