JAD ABUMRAD: This is Radiolab, I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT KRULWICH: And I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: And our topic today on Radiolab is zoos—the saddest places on the planet.

ROBERT: They're [laughs] what do I have to do? No, they are not the saddest places.

JAD: No, you know I'm right.

ROBERT: The point—look, despite everything we've said up to now about the true wildness of a zoo animal, the fact remains, looking into the eyes of a live animal can be an extraordinarily transformative experience, and don't ask me, ask Alan Rabinowitz.

ALAN RABINOWITZ: Okay. I'm Alan Rabinowitz.

ROBERT: He's gonna be our last stop on the show.

ALAN RABINOWITZ: I'm the head of a program that seeks to explore the Earth's last great wild areas and try to protect them.

ROBERT: Alan Rabinowitz is a renowned animal conservationist. He set up wildlife preserves all over the world. And Jad, like you, he's not particularly thrilled by zoos, although without a zoo—and I'm thinking of the Bronx zoo in particular—he wouldn't be who he is today, because when Alan was very young, very young he had a terrible stutter.

ALAN RABINOWITZ: Oh, I couldn't talk. My body would spasm.

ROBERT: So if you wanted to say "Coming, Mom."

ALAN RABINOWITZ: Coming, see coming's a hard contact. Coming is the tongue against the upper palate.

ROBERT: So you couldn't get the word out?

ALAN RABINOWITZ: I didn't speak a fluent sentence to another human being until I went to this—finally this clinic when I was a senior in college.

ROBERT: A senior in college?

ALAN RABINOWITZ: Yeah. I never went on a date, I never kissed a girl other than my mom.

ROBERT: How do you connect to anybody?

ALAN RABINOWITZ: I didn't connect to anybody, I had no friends.

ROBERT: None?

ALAN RABINOWITZ: That's how I—none. I had little animals that I would take into the closet with me and I would talk to them fluently.

ROBERT: And that's how it was for Alan. For much of his childhood the only time he says he could free his tongue to talk was in the dark with his pets.

ALAN RABINOWITZ: Green turtles, hamsters, gerbils and chameleons, which would all die. I would talk the way we're talking.

ROBERT: Really?

ALAN RABINOWITZ: I could talk fluently to the animals.

ROBERT: And his father one time overheard him talking in the dark and he thought, "Well, maybe we should take this boy to the zoo."

ALAN RABINOWITZ: To the Bronx Zoo.

ROBERT: To the Bronx Zoo.

ALAN RABINOWITZ: He used to bring me to the old gray cat house. Horrendous, you remember the gray ...

ROBERT: It was an iron, black cage ...

ALAN RABIONOWITZ: It was classic. Old concrete floors. But you'd go in, I mean, talk about an experience! You'd walk in and hear growling and roaring, it sounded incredible. Raw power.

ROBERT: And he loved being there, he just loved it.

ALAN RABINOWITZ: All those noises of, like, 20 cats all together, vocalizing at the same time. Maybe it was the sound which appealed to me as a kid that couldn't speak.

ROBERT: And once again, in front of the zoo cats, if he was alone he could talk.

ALAN RABINOWITZ: Yeah, my father, it's funny because he knew I talked to the animals, so he would stand back. He knew if he came too close I'd stop because I would stutter because he was there.

ROBERT: But if he wasn't, you could talk more fluently.

ALAN RABINOWITZ: I could talk fluently. And there was one—one old jaguar. And I remember as a kid I would stand there and I would watch—I'd watch this magnificent, huge strong beast. This massive, strong animal had blank eyes. It just looked blank, and it was pacing back and forth and back and forth. I felt this animal is like me because I felt strong, I felt good, I felt powerful inside, but yet I was trapped inside this cage of my body.

ROBERT: And that's when Alan remembers turning to that cat as a kind of fellow exile and whispering a promise.

ALAN: That I would try to find a place for us. I remember that. I remember saying once, "I'll find a place for us." And I didn't mean that particular—I don't know what I meant. I mean, I can't really look back and know exactly what I meant, but I—I felt no matter what I would find a place for us.

ROBERT: And that promise ...

ALAN: I would find a place for us.

ROBERT: ... he kept that promise in his head for two decades. He went on to visit a speech therapist, he learned how to use his mouth and tongue to get past his stutter—not completely, but enough to finish college and then go on to graduate school to study wildlife ecology. And it was at his graduation party from graduate school when he got the offer that would change his life.

ALAN: At my going away party my major professor asked me if I wanted to go to Belize and—and do—and study jaguars.

ROBERT: Not just study them, count them.

ALAN: An objective survey of how many jaguars are really in the country.

ROBERT: Alan asked, "How do you count jaguars?" And that's when the professor said, "Well, you gotta catch them."

ALAN: Catch a jaguar? I have no idea! It's like saying, "Go catch a dragon."

ROBERT: Everybody knew that jaguars are still the almost ghost-like cats in a forest.

ALAN: Nobody had ever captured jaguars in the rainforest.

ROBERT: But that was exactly what the professor was proposing: go to a little country in Central America.

ALAN: Belize.

ROBERT: Go deep into its jungle, collar as many jaguars as you can so that we can track them and learn about them. Weeks passed, picture Alan on the edge of the jungle in Belize with absolutely no idea what to do next.

ALAN: We opened a map of Belize. It had one dirt road down the entire country.

ROBERT: Alan figures the only way he's gonna catch a jaguar is to talk to people who hunt jaguars. Now they're there. They're—he calls them Mayans, and they live in the forest.

ALAN: And I went to the hunters and they told me run them with dogs. And one hunter still had jaguar dogs, and I'll tell you of everything I've ever done in my life, I still rank that as the absolute hardest, because when these dogs get on a jaguar scent it's a bloodlust. You're running full speed through the jungle. The Mayans are in front of us, running and chopping at the same time, and I knew in my mind that there were poisonous snakes, but you can't think about it because you don't have time to look where you're running or your feet.

ROBERT: And one time, dashing behind dogs and machete-waving hunters, disaster struck. They were just about to actually tree a jaguar when one of the crew got bit by a poisonous snake.

ALAN: And he died. So everybody quit. Nobody'd work for me, they all thought I was jinxed. So then I had to figure out how to capture jaguars by myself—nobody'd work for me. Finally one Mayan Indian came to work for me, and we ended up building traps. And I would put live pigs, because they didn't want dead meat, they would want live meat which they could kill themselves, so I put live pigs in the back of these traps. I'd have to go feed the pigs every single day. The first trap I built, I built it out of two-by-fours. I caught a jaguar, and the jaguar chewed its way through the two-by-four door and busted its way out of the two-by-fours.

ROBERT: Whoa!

ALAN: I mean, they are powerful animals. And then I built iron rebar. Even then I made a mistake. One jaguar got so mad, it bit the iron rebar and pulled at the iron rebar and snapped its canines. It snapped its own canines trying to bust the iron rebar. I mean, its roots were hanging out and I put it down. I tried to do primitive dentistry, I had to cut the roots and it was lying there dying, and I just felt so bad. I carried the jaguar back to my cabin, I lay next to it and it died on the floor next to me. I just lost it. I lost it.

ROBERT: But one good thing came out of this experience, he learned to build a better trap, and so cat by cat by cat, Alan was able—and he was the first to do this—he was able to count the jaguars in that forest, and there were thousands of them. But he had this sense—and again this was—he was first—that they were in real danger because around them people were cutting down their forest, and if the forest went the jaguars go too. So that's when he began a campaign which eventually led him to the prime minister.

ALAN: I—I was given a chance, and not only did the—did the prime minister agree to meet me, but he—he invited me to address him and the whole cabinet. But only 15 minutes.

ROBERT: Now remember, this is a guy who for two whole decades could barely speak. His stutter, which is now less of a problem, was still there, and now he's being asked to address a prime minister and a cabinet in a high pressure, make-it-or-break-it, 15 minutes-or-bust situation.

ALAN: I knew I couldn't stutter. I mean, I only had 15 minutes. I said look, "You will lose nothing by this. If you don't protect it, guaranteed it's gonna be gone, because the citrus people want it for both timber and citrus. Make it a forest reserve, and make it tentative. Make it a five-year agreement. If I can't prove to you I can bring in for—I can bring in outside money in five years, what do you have to lose? And if it works, you've got a jaguar preserve. You have the world's first jaguar preserve."

ROBERT: Now his pitch was supposed to last 15 minutes, that's the time he was allotted, but he went way over.

ALAN: I ended up staying in there an hour and a half.

ROBERT: And the vote was a tie in the cabinet. The Prime Minister himself broke the tie in Alan's favor.

ALAN: And by the end he agreed. The Prime Minister voted in my favor. And that made it. It got great press as the world's first jaguar preserve. To this day, it's the world's only area designated specifically as a jaguar preserve.

ROBERT: And by the way, the whole time with the prime minister and all, that whole time he never stuttered. So Alan decided his work was more or less done, he could go home now to New York. And just before he left, he decided to go for one last walk in the jungle, a last visit. He wasn't looking for jaguars, he wasn't expecting to see one, this was his goodbye, but when he was looking down at the ground as he walked along, suddenly he thought, "Well, hello!" Because there, on the ground right in front of him, was a fresh print of a jaguar—a big one!

ALAN: Bigger than any I had seen in that area. And that just got my blood—the blood going. So I started following it. You almost never, never see a jaguar when you follow its tracks, because it knows you're there. I mean, I was hoping against hope that maybe I'd see the jaguar, but actually I didn't think I would because they always knew I was coming and they'd always go away. And then it started getting dark, it started getting late, and I didn't want to be in the jungle at night. I didn't have a flashlight or anything. So that's when I turned around, and there was the jaguar about 15 feet away.

ROBERT: Behind you.

ALAN: It was behind me. Been behind me probably quite a ways.

ROBERT: So it knew that you were tracking it, and it decided to find out who you were.

ALAN: It had circled around, and it probably cut off into the forest, watched me as I passed then got back on the trail and just stayed back a good ways.

ROBERT: And it was pretty clear this cat had been creeping closer and closer.

ALAN: To where by the time I turned around, it had shortened its distance between us really small. I mean, that was ...

ROBERT: So it was in leaping distance?

ALAN: I couldn't have gotten away from it, and I knew that. So I did what I thought was the right thing, which is make myself small, make myself subdominant, just crouch down. And then the jaguar did something which I didn't expect it to do. It sat down. And that was strange to me. And then I got scared and I stood up and I stepped back, because I felt the distance was too close now. That—that it didn't like, and all this time I mean, I'm totally aware I have no place to go.

ROBERT: And with no place to go, nowhere to run, Alan just stood there frozen in place, and the jaguar rose and it too just stood absolutely silent.

ALAN: Then it just turned and started walking off into the jungle, And before it disappeared into the brush, it turned back to look at me. Then I really looked it in the eyes, and they were wild eyes, there was fire in the jaguar's eyes. The last thing I remember very clearly is looking into its eyes and thinking of seeing the jaguar in the Bronx Zoo as a child, but seeing the wildness in this animal's eyes it didn't look anything like that cat in the cage—it showed strength and freedom. And we had just protected this incredible area which now would be its home, and I remember telling the cat at one point that I'd find a place for us.

ROBERT: Dr. Alan Rabinowitz is the director for science and exploration at the Wildlife Conservation Society, and if you want to read more about his jaguar adventures in Belize, the book is called Jaguar: One Man's Struggle to Establish the World's First Jaguar Preserve.

JAD: We should wrap up.

ROBERT: Mm-hmm.

JAD: For more information on anything that you heard today check our website, Radiolab.org.

ROBERT: We got a podcast.

JAD: We do. You can sign up for it there or at iTunes. And send us an email and let us know what you think: radiolab(@)wnyc.org is the address.

ROBERT: And Radiolab is one word.

JAD: It is. I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT: And I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: And we'll see you ...

ROBERT: At the zoo. We'll see you at the zoo. At least, some of us.

JAD: [laughs]

[ANSWERING MACHINE VOICE: First message.]

[DAVID HANCOCKS: Radiolab is produced by Jad Abumrad. Ellen Horne, senior producer. Lulu Miller assistant producer. Production executive Dean Cappello, Production support by Sarah Pellegrini, Bret Baier, Scott Goldberg, Alaska Keyville, Sam Leviander, Avir Mitra, Ryan Scamole and Jacob Weinberg. Also, very special thanks to Tamar Llewellyn, and Amy Bush's class at Northstar Academy for their musical contributions.]

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