ONÇAFARI

Grants

Jul 7

Written By Holtzman Wildlife Foundation .

Onçafari was established in August 2011, when the co-founder and creator of Onçafari, former Formula 1 racing driver, Mario Haberfeld, began his work at the Caiman Ecological Refuge. Since then, ONÇAFARI has collected data and assembled information to grasp a better understanding on jaguar behavior, as well as discover better conservation strategies for the biggest feline of the Americas.

The Holtzman Wildlife Foundation has made several grants to ONÇAFARI.

Brazilian Jaguars in Danger

Although the Pantanal is Brazil’s best-preserved biome, jaguars occupy just 47%, and the effective size of the population is estimated at less than 1,000 individuals. Hunting for retaliation, preventive, and recreational purposes is the main problem leading to the reduction of these jaguars.

Protection Through Ecotourism

The Foundation awarded its first grant to support ONÇAFARI’s effort to establish several “re-wilding” facilities. ONÇAFARI has had considerable success in re-introducing injured or orphaned jaguars into the wild, and it now wishes to establish facilities that will allow it to re-introduce other endangered species into Brazil’s tropical forest, including tapirs and Pantanal deer. The grant supported the construction of these re-wilding facilities over a two-year period.

In its second grant to ONÇAFARI, the Holtzman Wildlife Foundation provided a grant to support the re-wilding of a Jaguar cub that lost its mother to a forest fire.

Working with the local university, ONÇAFARI has offered to re-wild the two-month-old cub that would have otherwise gone to a zoo. Having lost its mother, the cub would not have learned how to hunt and survive. ONÇAFARI has a proven program to re-wild Jaguars, and it will embark on a two-year program to prepare the cub for release in the rainforest.

A third potential grant to ONÇAFARI to support Mane Wolf reintroduction is under consideration.