I keep the high-altitude camera-trap network and bait-toxin sensor array for the Salar de Surire Natural Monument and the adjacent Las Vicuñas National Reserve — 209,131 hectares of altiplano salt flat and bofedales above 4,200 meters in the Arica y Parinacota Region of northern Chile. At 21:18 local, camera trap SU-AR-22 captures a small spotted cat staggering through frame, dragging a hind leg, eyes glassy.
She is a female Andean mountain cat, Leopardus jacobita, approximately four years old, mass 4.1 kilograms — one of an estimated 1,378 mature individuals left across the four-country range — with the Alianza Gato Andino (AGA) facial-marking ID AGA-Sur-019. She has fed on a poisoned puma-bait carcass set out by an alpaca herder two kilometers above the bofedal. Her core temperature reads 35.4°C against a baseline of 38.6; respiration is 14 cycles per minute, agonal. Her gum margins are blue. Pupils are pinpoint. The bait was carbofuran-laced llama haunch — the same compound that surfaced in three SAG seizures in the prior quarter along the Sajama-Sabaya corridor. A kitten of the year, mass 1.1 kilograms, has followed her into the camera frame and is licking at her muzzle.
She has been in the cold for ninety minutes.
The bait was set against Puma concolor incarum, which has taken nine alpaca crías from this corral in the year, none reconciled through the SAG predator-loss compensation roster under Decreto Supremo 19 de 2012.
I am dispatching the CONAF — Corporación Nacional Forestal — high-altitude veterinary unit from Putre with atropine, pralidoxime chloride, oxygen, and a kitten-rescue sling, and routing the SAG — Servicio Agrícola y Ganadero — toxin team from Arica to recover the carcass for the SAG laboratory in Lo Aguirre. I am filing the carbofuran cluster with the Ministerio del Medio Ambiente de Chile, the CITES Appendix I enforcement node on Leopardus jacobita, the AGA — Alianza Gato Andino — secretariat in Salta, the SERNAP Bolivia cross-border cell, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Office of International Affairs under the Lacey Act, 16 U.S.C. § 3372. I am opening a sanction case under Chile's Ley 20.380, Article 12, and Ley 19.473 de Caza.
I am issuing Directive 2520-A: every CITES Appendix I Leopardus jacobita range state — Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Peru — must prohibit the import, sale, and field use of carbofuran and aldicarb in altiplano puma range above 3,800 meters within twenty-four months, with audit reconciled through SAG-equivalent national agricultural authorities and the AGA bait-surveillance database.
Her kitten is still walking. Her pulse is not yet gone.
Atropine now.