re: Bear vs Hog

If a jaguar showed up, he'd eat the hog and the bear. A Smithsonian article about a jaguar coming into southern Arizona described researchers finding evidence that the jag killed and ate a 230 lb. black bear.

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Mayke leads us to the bleaching bones of a torn-apart bear carcass. Bugbee picks up the skull. The front is crushed, and the back is punctured in four places, perhaps by jaguar teeth. “This is a really interesting find,” he says. “It looks like a jaguar kill, but there are no records of jaguars killing black bears.” Then Bugbee finds some whitish dried-up scat, far too old to hold a scent. “It looks like jaguar scat,” he says, “and those look like bear hairs in the scat.”

He puts the scat and the skull into zip-lock bags and outlines a likely scenario. “A young adult bear is foraging around, El Jefe explodes from ambush, knocks him on his arse, crushes his skull, and then feeds on him. But we need to test the scat. It could be mountain lion. Those hairs might not be bear.”

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Removing the bear skull from its zip-lock bag, he shows it to Neils, an expert on black bears from her years studying them in Florida. “This was a young adult female about 230 pounds,” she says.

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The scat was confirmed (by a dog trained to find jag scat) to be jaguar, and the hairs in it were confirmed in the lab as black bear.

Smithsonian: The Return of the Great American Jaguar


El Jefe, the only known wild jaguar in the United States, wandering the Santa Rita Mountains.

Legend has it the bear was just going back up the mountain to grab his Crystals hot sauce.

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jaguar

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I have read somewhere that pound for pound they are the most powerful of all the big cats.

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Why post this?

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Why post this?

Go Bears!