Apartment blocks and shopping centers sprout like mushrooms around wild cat sanctuary, avoiding the recovered pumas in human harm in the state of São Paulo, Brazil.
Mata Ciliar's sanctuary extends to 40 football fields just 90 kilometers (56 miles) from the state capital Sao Paulo, the largest metropolis in Latin America.
25 pumas and 10 jaguars are being treated at the center – including Barreiro, a five-year-old PUMA named after a semi-rural community who was found trapped with steel cables.
Barreiro is undergoing a deep cut in his hips.
“As urbanization develops into its natural habitat, it is lost between roads, gated communities and other human interventions when Puma moves,” Mata Ciliar President Jorge Bellix told AFP.
As its habitat shrinks as humans expand, Puma is forced to get closer to settlements to find food—probably including pets and livestock, as its natural deer and smaller wildlife diets will decrease.
Big cats can be knocked down by cars, electric to the safety fence or beset by hunters trying to catch wild boars, or residents catching wild boars.
Some people are poached for skins or trophies.
“If we continue to do this, we will witness the extinction of several species of (animal) species in a few years,” said Belix. Belix said that the shelter in Belix has treated about 32,000 organisms since its establishment about 30 years ago.
– “Stone Jungle” –
Mata Ciliar can also accommodate monkeys and mandors, located in a country with the highest wildcat diversity in the world, in the vast forest of Mata Atlantica.
But only a few kilometers away is shrouded in the gray of St. Paul, a metropolis nicknamed “The Stone Jungle”.
“The situation is crucial: St. Paul's animals are losing the war against urbanization,” said veterinarian Cristina Harumi.
She added that PUMA sat at the top of the food chain and was considered a biological guide: its disappearance would be a shocking sign of the degree of environmental degradation.
The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) is listed as a “near-threatening” PUMA in Brazil, which maintains a “red list of threatened species” while mountain lion species outside the Amazon basin are considered “frail”.
FFB/LL/LG/ESP/ALH/MLR/JGC
