That’s all, folks! The last Jaguar in the United States has been killed.

The beast in question, a sixteen year old male named “Macho B”, was euthanized by state biologists after being caught and collared in a trap that was supposedly set to catch bears and mountain lions. There’s an excellent article in the Zonie report that seems to sum it up. In fact, it sounds a lot like something I might have written. As usual, what we’ve got here is a story rife with inexplicably revolting and duplicitous human behaviour. Something I find fascinating about this particular case is the obvious role that the concept of science, and of scientific conservation, is playing in the destruction of the natural world. . All the monitoring, tagging, data collection, analysis, prognoses, spreadsheets, cost-benefit ratios and et motherfucking cetera add up to precisely one thing: Jaguars are extinct in the continental United States. Human scientific examination of the natural world functions in much the same way as a ray of sunlight focused through a high-powered maginfying glass: Subjects are illuminated in light so strong it immolates them, and the ash from their pyres fills the pages of sagacious texts. It brings to mind a proclamation by the Judge in Cormac McCarthy’s awesome novel Blood Meridian, which, in paraphrase, goes something like: ” Once mankind knows the names and properties of all the creatures and plants and processes of the Earth, he will control them utterly and they will writhe before him, impaled on the pin of his knowledge, unable to escape.” Add in the million-dollar-a-mile border fence and you have a guarantee that whatever jaguars remain in Sonora will not be repopulating their northern range anytime soon. That’s a terrible pity, because if there’s one thing North America needs, it’s some PREDATORS that aren’t PRIMATES.