Until just a few years ago, it was common for men gathered in the local bars of Brazil’s Pantanal region, site of the world’s largest freshwater wetland, to swap stories about their latest jaguar-hunting experiences. So says Wendell Ribeiro, 48, a native of the region.

Like many friends and family, Ribeiro began handling guns at an early age. “I learned to hunt when I was very small, and when I grew up I worked on ranches to protect cattle from [jaguar] attacks,” he says. Ribeiro later moved to the Mato Grosso do Sul state’s capital of Campo Grande, where he worked as a private security guard until, five years later, he realized he wanted to return to the wildlands of the Pantanal and did just that.

Once back, however, he found a far different line of work—leading ecotourists on horseback rides and other recreational activities. He does so at Fazenda Caiman, a 53,000-hectare (131,000-acre) private landholding in the Pantanal that does, in fact, raise cattle, an activity with a 250-year history in the region’s grasslands. But there’s no hunting. That’s because Caiman’s overarching focus—and main source of income—is biodiversity conservation and the ecotourists it attracts to a popular onsite lodge and wildlife-watching operation.

Other cattle ranches in the region are following suit, offering visitors the chance to see wild jaguars (Panthera onca), the main drawing card, but also other fauna including the collared anteater (Tamandua tetradactyla), marsh deer (Blastocerus dichotomus), tapir (Tapirus terrestris), capybara (Hydrochoerus hydrochaeris), and a staggering array of birds.

The Pantanal covers about 200,000 square kilometers (77,000 sq. miles), with the vast bulk of that area located in central-western Brazil and portions of it extending into Bolivia and Paraguay. Recognized by Unesco as a Natural Heritage of Humanity, it is extraordinarily biodiverse. At the same time, though, the biome is quite vulnerable given its dependence on adjacent, upland water sources that are increasingly constricted by climate change and contaminated by monocrop agriculture—soy cultivation, for the most part.

Precipitation in the October-to-March rainy season greatly expand the wetland, but in recent years the extent of flooding has declined. They attribute the trend to climate change, which they say is also causing greater frequency and intensity of wildfires, which have swept across enormous swaths of the Pantanal, incinerating vast quantities of plants and animals.

Private ranches a challenge

Arguably the Pantanal’s greatest conservation challenge is that 95% of its land comprises privately owned cattle ranches, according to the international environmental organization WWF. In that context, Caiman aims to demonstrate that ecotourism can coexist with sustainably managed cattle ranching by incentivizing biodiversity conservation with support from the ranchers themselves.

“This is the best place in the world to see jaguars,” says biologist Lucas Morgado, an ecotourism guide at Caiman, as he drove a group of visitors in a roofless vehicle outfitted to navigate the Pantanal’s dirt roads. “No tourist leaves here without seeing at least one jaguar. We’ve gone from 35 sightings in 2012, with 16% of visitors seeing jaguars, to 1,072 sightings in 2024, with 100% of visitors seeing jaguars. When we began, almost 15 years ago, jaguars were scared by the vehicles and would leave. Now they are accustomed and you can see them very relaxed.”

Morgado works for Onçafari, a nonprofit jaguar-conservation project that has operated since 2011 at Caiman and has expanded from the Pantanal into three other Brazilian biomes—the Amazon rainforest, the Cerrado savanna and the Atlantic Forest.

The venture was created by former Formula 1 race car driver Mario Haberfeld. He proposed using tourism as a conservation tool by conducting African-style safaris in the Pantanal to raise visitors’ environmental consciousness and generate funds for jaguar monitoring, research, and educational programming.

Oncafari is active at Pantanal ranches including Caiman, which operates a 24-suite luxury lodge year-round. Four other conservation initiatives are underway at the ranch, focusing on the anteater, hyacinth macaw (Anodorhynchus hyacinthinus), blue fronted parrot (Amazona aestiva), and tapir.

The idea of making Caiman a center of conservation projects was developed in the 1980s by the ranch’s owner, Roberto Klabin, an environmentally minded businessman and attorney. (See Q&A with Klabin—this issue.) In the first project, begun in 1998, the Hyacinth Macaw Institute, a Brazilian nonprofit, set up a field station in Caiman. The institute’s efforts on behalf of the endangered bird in the Pantanal range from research and education to installation of artificial nests.

Conservation efforts broaden

The latest project to start up at Caiman was launched last year by the Tamanduá Institute, a nonprofit in various parts of the country to conserve anteaters, armadillos and sloths.

“Caiman is like an enormous, excellently conserved laboratory of wildlife that is a great place for study,” says Jorge Gallo, a biologist with the Tamanduá Institute. “The idea is to attract tourists with the conservation work. Each nongovernmental organization at Caiman can organize fauna-observation tours and in this way raise funds for its work.”

Rafael Hoogesteijn, a longtime Pantanal researcher with expertise in feline predation of livestock, points out that because ranches also benefit from the influx of ecotourists, they have become keen supporters of conservation efforts.

“Today ecotourism is a very interesting source of income for ranch owners and is compatible with ranching,” Hoogesteijn, who since 1986 has served on the Cat Specialist Group of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), told EcoAméricas. “It also is an income source for people who earn a living as drivers or cooks and who, for this reason, are very zealous about preserving fauna.”

Adds Hoogesteijn: “Still, there continues to be a certain degree of conflict between cattle-ranching and jaguars, whose populations have grown since the 1980s, when hunting and international trade in [jaguar] skins were halted. That’s why we continue developing anti-predation strategies, among the most effective of which are electric fences. For the ranches that host tourists, income [from paying visitors] offsets the loss of livestock. For those that don’t have tourism, the jaguar remains a problem.”