A Chinese had planned to buy the baby jaguars and take them to Honduras.
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T. SCHWARZ / REUTERS
Two young jaguars narrowly escaped a tragic fate.
They were rescued by a zoo in Nicaragua as they were about to be sold illegally.
Poachers were holding the felines, a female and a three-month-old male, in the Autonomous Region north of the Caribbean coast.
To capture them, they first killed the mother of the cubs, said zoo director Eduardo Sacasa who took part in the rescue operation.
An alert on social networks
The wild animals were to be given to a Chinese buyer and then they should have been taken to Honduras.
But an alert via social networks accompanied by a photo of the caged cats caused their project to fail.
The zoo then contacted the traffickers who agreed that the director would come and collect the jaguars but without the authorities.
At the end of a journey by plane, car and boat, the zoo director reaches the village where the animals were found.
“They are thin, they gave them cowhide to eat,” he explained.
Jaguars are, along with the tapir, the most endangered animals in Nicaragua, the zoo manager said.
In captivity, they can live up to 25 years while in the wild they do not live more than 10 years due to destruction of forests and illegal hunting.
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