Jaguars
by: Ian


Imagine you’re walking on the Mexican Plains and you see movement in the grass. All of a sudden you go white because you hear a grunting noise, and then you find out it is a jaguar. You feel like just going over there and feeling its thick, soft, fur, coat but you know better.

The jaguar does not have lot of names, but it has a few. The jaguar’s common name is the jaguar. The scientific name for the jaguar is Panthera Onca.
People get confused that a jaguar is a leopard, but the leopard has bigger spots.The Jaguar is closely re leopards, pumas, tigers, loins, and mountain lions. The color of the jaguar is yellowish orange with black spots. Jaguar adults can weigh from 124 to 211 pounds. Larger jaguars can be 333 pounds.

The jaguar needs stealth, food, water, and a mother for survival. The jaguar will live in dry areas or forests with a lot of vegetation. The jaguar’s food is armadillos, Brocket deer, rabbits, peccaries (a kind of pig), wild guinea pigs, tapirs, porcupines, otters, sloths, capybaras, monkeys, skunks, coatis, snakes, iguanas, herons, caimans, storks, anhingas, and cormorants. It will eat most animals it can find! A jaguar will sometimes stalk an animal for about thirty to forty-five minutes. It uses stealth to find its food.
The jaguar lives in South America and Mexico. Leopards might be closer to extinction because the leopard has bigger spots, and may be more fashionable. It is hard to find out exactly how big the population of jaguar is because they are nocturnal, they blend in well, and they live in the jungle.
Jaguars are valued for many things, but mostly because of their fur. Some people will sometimes try to have the jaguar as a pet, but the people will often get killed by their own jaguar! Mostly the jaguar will get killed for its fur. But sometimes the jaguar will be forced to move out of its habitat because people are making too many cities and creating landscaping for buildings.
The threats to the jaguar are serious but humans are the main problem for jaguars. The first thing is that people have been hunting them, even though it is illegal. it is been illegal ever since the big cat hunt of the 1960s. Sometimes people kill them just for fun, which is sad. Lastly, people keep on building cities near the jaguar’s habitat running them out of their homes.
Those are some pretty bad threats, but there are some ways that we can stop those things from happening. The first way we can stop the jaguar from extinction is try to stop people from hunting the jaguar. The main reason they are endangered is that people have been wiping out their habitat to create cities. We should not stop making cities but when we do, we must create a protected area for the jaguar.

Works Cited
Malaspina, Ann. Jaguars. San Diego: Lucent Books, 2001. Print.