In 1986, a biologist with a severe stutter persuaded Belize to create the world's first jaguar preserve, then he envisioned a 5,000-mile wildlife corridor

As a child, Alan Rabinowitz stuttered so badly he could barely finish a sentence. Rabinowitz told Claudia Dreifus in a December 2007 New York Times interview that this stutter was what first drew him to conservation, because animals never judged how he spoke. Decades later, that boy who talked to pets instead of people would help change how governments think about protecting wild cats.

A childhood spent talking to animals, not people

Rabinowitz was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1953 and brought up in Queens. Because of his stutter, school was difficult, and he struggled to connect with teachers and classmates. However, in the confines of his home, Rabinowitz had no problem relating to his pets, an experience that influenced his career choice. Rabinowitz graduated from the University of Tennessee in 1981 with a Master's degree in zoology and a PhD in wildlife ecology. He went on to conduct a field study on jaguars in Belize, working in the forests there. His research helped convince the Belizean government that jaguars needed a dedicated and legally protected home. That effort led to the creation of the Cockscomb Basin Wildlife Sanctuary in 1986, the first reserve established specifically for jaguars.

Beyond Belize: tigers, leopards, and a newly discovered deer

Rabinowitz’s work was not limited to jaguars. In Thailand, he conducted the initial field studies of Indochinese tigers, Indochinese leopards, and Asian leopard cats. That research helped lay the groundwork for UNESCO's 1991 decision to designate the Huai Kha Khaeng and neighboring Thungyai Naresuan Wildlife Sanctuaries as a World Heritage Site. He also helped establish Taiwan’s Tawu Mountain Nature Reserve, the country’s largest protected area.

In 1997, his team discovered four new mammal species in Myanmar’s Hukaung Valley, among them a small, ancient-looking deer. The animal was formally described as the leaf deer in a 1999 study titled ‘Description of the leaf deer (Muntiacus putaoensis), a new species of muntjac from northern Myanmar’ co-authored by Rabinowitz, Than Myint, Saw Tun Khaing, and his wife, S. Rabinowitz, and published in the Journal of Zoology, and is now considered to be one of the most primitive deer species to date. His fieldwork in Myanmar also helped establish several protected areas, including the country’s first marine national park and, at the time, the world’s largest tiger reserve.

From one preserve to a continent-wide corridor

In 2006, he and chairman Thomas Kaplan helped found Panthera, a nonprofit dedicated to wild cat conservation. A single sanctuary can protect only the jaguars inside it, while jaguars roam far beyond reserve borders to hunt and find mates. Rabinowitz had a breakthrough at a 1999 conference, where a genetic study showed jaguar populations across the Americas were all the same species, moving and interbreeding along a roughly 5,000-mile stretch from Patagonia to the deserts of New Mexico and Arizona. Rabinowitz said saving the species meant protecting the land that connects separate populations, not just the populations themselves, and that idea became the Jaguar Corridor Initiative.

In 2010, Rabinowitz and ecologist Kathy Zeller published a study in Biological Conservation that mapped 90 jaguar populations across Central and South America and modeled the safest possible routes between them. The study found 182 potential corridors connecting those populations, forming a connected network from Mexico toward Argentina. The paper’s findings suggested that much of the jaguar’s historic range was still passable, but that some corridors were under increasing pressure from human activities. At Panthera, he later launched a similar Tiger Corridor Initiative to connect large tiger landscapes across the Indo-Himalayan region.

A legacy that outlived him

Rabinowitz was diagnosed with chronic lymphocytic leukemia in 2001, but kept up his fieldwork and advocacy for years. In November 2017, he resigned as Panthera’s president and CEO to devote himself fully to serving as chief scientist. Rabinowitz passed away on August 5, 2018, at age 64.

Throughout his life, Rabinowitz served as a spokesman for the Stuttering Foundation, using his own experience to encourage young people who stutter. Rabinowitz's life teaches a simple lesson: the inability to speak fluently didn't prevent him from being heard. The boy who used to talk to animals went on to persuade governments to protect them and to argue that scattered ecosystems should be treated as a connected system.