Much is seen in social media about the famous Puma of Patagonia; the famous Andes range, with its lush forests and its glacial lakes, are a worthy home for the second largest cat in the American continent.
Yet, little is known about the Puma of the Pampas; Argentina’s lush green plains in the center of the country are just as good of a home for this versatile species. As it happens everywhere around the world, here, on one of the most famously productive lands on the planet, agriculture and wildlife came into conflict, and of course, wildlife lost. Most of the species that used to roam the Pampas before large-scale agriculture began at the beginning of the 20th century, are now either gone, or reduced to almost nothing.
Being large carnivores, the Puma of the Pampas have been hunted down for hundreds of years so their populations have been wiped out in a particularly aggressive way. This of course, added to unsustainable forms of agriculture, has resulted in a depletion of natural resources that has left a once thriving ecosystem completely ravaged.
The carnivore-livestock conflict is a global issue that has been addressed differently across the spectrum of possibilities. On one end you get the “wildlife was here first” type of approach, which many times tends to leave humans out of the picture, or at least, reduced to a mere visitor; and on the other end, you get the savage “let’s kill everything” way, which is just plainly ignorant, to say the least..
WAW has been involved in trying to collaborate with projects that are coming up with different alternatives in between of the extremes, because there are reasonable initiatives all over the world which prove that coexistence is definitely possible. Humans don’t need to kill every other creature in order to coexist with wildlife; we have known that since the beginning of time. Anyone who acts or thinks differently is just choosing to do so.
One of those precious projects is the one spearheaded by Dr. Estela Luengos and Dr. Mauro Lucherini in the southwest of the province of Buenos Aires, Argentina, where they have been studying conflicts between wild carnivores and livestock productive activities, mitigation measures and secondary drivers of conflict for decades. By immersing themselves in the local productive activities and culture, they have been learning what humans in this ecosystem need in order to thrive with their productive activities while not killing every wild animal that steps into their property. Working with local governments, civil institutions and society in general, they are on their way to establish a solid body of information that will be available for generations to come.
Learn more about their work by visiting their blog and their social media.
