WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE - More than a quarter of Nicaraguan households keep wildlife as pets, but now the country is cracking down

International Wildlife, Sept-Oct, 2000 by Steve Hendrix

"A hundred fifty dollars," he says through the open window, holding the squirming cat by the scruff of its neck.

The prices are premium because this intersection borders a wealthy neighborhood known as a good market for pets.

In nearby streets, parrot sellers still regularly peddle birds door-to- door, calling "Loras! Loras!" as they work the block. In one house, Maritza Arguello Jaen feeds bits of nut to her father's latest pets, two spectacular young toucans living in the shade of a spreading mango tree. Other cages house an older toucan and a pair of parrots.

From over the fence, the neighbor's boisterous macaw is clearly audible. "Everybody has animals here," says Arguello. "Especially the older generation. My father just got these to impress his grandchildren, but he's the one who really likes them."

Around the corner, Arguello's friend Blanca Perez tends her own family menagerie-the usual pair of parrots holding court on the patio plus a pair of white-tailed deer grazing placidly in the backyard. "We've always had deer; my father loves them," says Perez, an executive at a coffee company. She laughs a little sheepishly. "And on special occasions, we eat them."

A few miles away, Vittorio Tassinari gingerly maneuvers bamboo into the pen of his pet jaguar, one of two he has kept for five years. "They were cute when they were cubs," Tassinari says as the massive male gnaws at the leaves with chilling white teeth. "We didn't think about them getting this big." A few years ago, Tassinari built a bigger block of cages and moved the cats to his restaurant, where they live off an ample diet of leftover beef and chicken. He has also kept a puma here, and once a crocodile in a small fish pond. "They're good for business. People love the wild animals."

What lies behind Nicaragua's intense relationship with its wildlife? Biologist Carlos Drews-a researcher whose work in neighboring Costa Rica determined that keeping pets is significantly more common in the city than in rural areas-suggests that increasing urbanization in Central America is one of the forces driving the demand for wild pets. As more people flock to the cities, they're looking to reclaim something of the natural countryside they leave behind. That's what led the family of student Gilberto Araya to buy its first pair of parrots two years ago. "When we brought my grandmother to Managua, she missed the sound of her farm," Araya says. "She wanted birds around her."

But ornithologist David Wiedenfeld, who has researched wild parrot populations all over Nicaragua, takes a different view. In Nicaragua, at least, pets are just as common in rural areas as in the capital, he says. Wiedenfeld thinks Nicaraguans keep animals for the same reason every other society in the world does-they love them.

"People here like pets. People there like pets," he says by phone from his office at the University of Oklahoma's Sutton Avian Research Center.

But Zuniga and other Nicaraguan conservationists blame something else for their country's high level of wild pet ownership: the global demand for wildlife. Nicaragua remains a major source country for the international wildlife trade, both legal and illegal. In both cases, there is an irresistible incentive for poor campesinos to go into the woods and trap as many parrots as they can find. Animals they can't sell to international traders, they sell to local pet dealers.