Maintaining connected habitat corridors for jaguars across Central and South America is essential for genetic diversity, individual welfare, and long-term population viability.
Jaguar welfare is inseparable from landscape connectivity. Isolated jaguars in forest fragments cannot disperse to find mates, face inbreeding depression in small populations, and encounter elevated human conflict in shrinking territories. Dispersing sub-adult males crossing agricultural lands face vehicle strikes, illegal killing, and starvation in prey-poor matrices. Livestock depredation brings retaliatory killing — the primary human cause of jaguar mortality across much of the range. Individual jaguars living in well-connected, prey-rich habitat with low human persecution show the welfare outcomes their ecology supports: large territories, successful reproduction, and natural longevity. Habitat loss and fragmentation thus cause welfare harms at the individual level — not just population declines at the species level. Corridor conservation is both a welfare and a conservation imperative.