Are a Jaguar's Spots the Code of Life?

Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) was an Argentinean writer with a style that defies categorization. He would write about the collections of non-existent libraries. He would give an elaborate review of a copy of a book as though it was an original text. A reoccurring theme was labyrinths and the potential for discovery within. "Writing that is multi-layered, self-referential, elusive, and allusive is now frequently labeled Borgesian." (William Gibson).

Here we are concerned with his short story The God's Script (1949). It is the thoughts of Tzinacán "a magician of the pyramid of Qaholom." Tzinacán has been held prisoner for years by the conquistador Pedro de Alvarad--who also destroyed the pyramid.

With his mind adrift in solitary confinement Tzinacán has a vision of a god "foreseeing that at the end of time there would be devastation and ruin, wrote on the first day of Creation a magical sentence with the power to ward off those evils." It would have to be written in such a way that would survive for generations intact. Tzinacán considers looking at mountains, rivers, empires or the configuration of the stars for this code, but one by one comes to disregard all of these. "But in the progress of the centuries the mountain is levelled and the river will change course, empires experience mutation and havoc and the configuration of the stars varies."

Eventually Tzinacán concludes that the god's sentence is in the pattern of fur on big cats. "I imagined my god confiding his message to the living skin of the jaguars, who would love and reproduce without end..." The big cats are an ideal medium because "to say the tiger is to say the tigers that begot it, the deer and turtles devoured by it, the grass on which the deer fed, the earth that was mother to the grass, the heaven that gave birth to the earth." To paraphrase philosopher Jacques Derrida "There is nothing outside the tiger." (In the story the terms "jaguar" and "tiger" are used interchangeably)

It is doubtful that Borges thought that the truth of the divine was literally hidden on the fur of jaguars. The God's Script concludes with Tzinacán believing that not only has he has discovered this magical sentence, but if he utters it then his jailers will be struck down and his pyramid restored. Yet he decides that he no longer needs to say it because his own life is no longer relevant after having seen the universe in his dreams.

Yet Borges may have been on to more than he realized. We live in an age on the brink of environmental catastrophe. A time of devastation and ruin. But it is not hopeless, we've steered out of disaster before. And to save ourselves perhaps we need to save the jaguar.

The jaguar is an "umbrella species"-- if you protect it then you protect entire ecosystems. "If we have healthy jaguar populations, then it's likely that all biodiversity is healthy, because the prey and the forest have to be healthy for jaguars to survive." says Jordi Surkin, director of conservation at World Wildlife Fund Bolivia.

This is not just about protecting the pretty animals, their ecosystems directly benefit humans--providing freshwater, commercial fisheries, clean air, and crop pollination. These amount to billions of dollars in services.

Nor is protecting the jaguar just something people in South America need to do. The Southern United States is part of the jaguar's historic range but fewer than 10 jaguars have been spotted in the US since 1963. We need jaguars too.

Of course reintroducing an apex predator to the United States would not be universally popular. Jaguars pose a real threat to livestock, particularly when their natural prey has diminished. This is not an insurmountable obstacle though. Sheepdogs, electric fences and automatic floodlights can help ranchers co-exist with jaguars.

Jaguars face serious difficulties. They need broad swarths of land to survive, but deforestation has fragmented their populations into ever smaller and more isolated pockets. Poaching for jaguar fur and fangs has been on the rise. Academics and environmental activists have warned that the collapse of the Amazon rainforest is inevitable if Jair Bolsonaro remains president of Brazil.

Every jaguar has different patterns in their fur -- so there's no way for a fixed message to be passed through generations on their skin. Yet every individual jaguar has a message written across their living skin: one of beauty, grace and power. There's not a code on their skin that can save us, it is their existence that preserves us.

We can save animals when we want to, we have repeatedly before. We can save jaguars if we actively choose to do it.