[Aztlan] Man eating jaguars

[Diehl, Richard]

Man-eating Jaguars: Fact or Fantasy

 

Jaguars (Felis onca) have played a crucial role in ancient and contemporary religious belief and practices of Native Americans from Mexico to Argentina. The top carnivore in the lowland jungles, savannas, and swamps, its razor-sharp teeth and claws, together with its stealth and nocturnal habits make it the most feared animal in the American tropics. Forty years ago when I was cutting my teeth on Olmec archaeology at San Lorenzo, our cook Doña Domatila regaled us with stories of jaguar forays into the Tenochtitlan village of her youth and even rumors of the presence of a jaguar in the region would make our workmen tense. With good reason it became the avatar of Olmec and Maya kings as well as modern shamans.

 

I always assumed that humans fear jaguars because the former kill and eat the latter on a fairly regular basis. Imagine my surprise when Philip Drucker, a pioneering Olmec archaeologist and long-time rancher in the back country of southern Veracruz, Mexico, denied that such things ever happen. In 1969 Don Felipe, as he was known in Olmec-land, published an autobiography of his ranching days titled Tropical Frontier under the nom de plume Paul Record (many thanks to David Grove for a reference to this little-known gem). In it he states that that jaguars avoid humans if at all possible and that neither he nor any of his neighbors ever experienced a verifiable account of an attack on humans. Cattle yes, humans no. 

 

Additional research reveals that while attacks are very rare, they do occur. However consumption of human flesh is exceedingly rare and I have only found one reference to it. It was related by Kim Hill and A. Magdalena Hurtado, medical anthropologists who have studied Ache Indian foragers in Paraguay, in their recent book Ache Life History: the Ecology and Demography of a Foraging People. Their informants related a series of incidents in which a jaguar attacked, killed, and perhaps ate an Ache hunter. A few days later the same animal dug up and consumed the body of dead infant. Interestingly, the Indians assumed the jaguar was one they had raised as a cub and thus was accustomed to the presence of humans. 

 

Do "normal" jaguars eat humans? Or do only jaguars that are accustomed to being near humans eat them? Do these apparently reliable accounts report extreme cases, something analogous to human cannibalism in catastrophic circumstances? Did ancient jaguar attacks have anything to do with the sacralization of this magnificent animal? Is the scene carved on the living rock at Chalcatzingo the record of an actual event or the creation of a shaman who had tasted some of the local hallucinogens? Did the Olmecs with their numerous feline representations or their Chalcatzingo trade partners believe that jaguars attacked and even ate humans? I do not know, nor am I convinced that it really matters precisely WHY Native Americans held the jaguar and its spirit in such awe. The important thing is that they did. That makes it all the more lamentable that in 2007 the animal is extinct in virtually its entire former range and that its prospects for long term survival are very low. We need to treat everybody's sacred ancestors with respect and at least allow them living space and no ecosystem remains healthy very long without top-line predators. 

 

Dick Diehl