Alan Rabinowitz
Conservationist and champion of big cats around the world
Growing up with a severe stutter, Alan Rabinowitz felt damaged and alone. Talking to adults had become so traumatic, he often said, he found solace by retreating to his bedroom cupboard, where he kept a chameleon, snakes, a turtle and a gerbil. Speaking to his pets came more easily. They did not make him feel worthless, and were as voiceless as he was in the human world.
On visits to the Bronx Zoo with his father, he gravitated to the old Lion House, with its big cats roaring inside their cages. He found joy in talking to them, especially an old jaguar, who was wary and watchful.
“I would sit and whisper to this jaguar, outpouring all my emotions,” Rabinowitz said in an interview with Natural World Safaris, a tour operator, “and I promised that if one day I found my voice I would become their voice.”
He kept that promise. With therapy he found his voice – a particularly forceful and articulate one – as a leading big cat conservationist for the Wildlife Conservation Society, which runs the Bronx Zoo, and, since 2006, for Panthera, the wild cat conservation organisation that he co-founded.
Rabinowitz established the world’s first jaguar preserve, in Belize, and a vast tiger preserve in Myanmar. His research on the Asiatic leopard, Asian leopard cats and Asian civets at a wildlife sanctuary in Thailand helped determine how much space each species needed to live and reproduce and led to its designation as a UNESCO World Heritage site.
When Rabinowitz died on Sunday at 64 in a hospital in Manhattan, he had been working for more than a decade on a complex project to protect and connect jaguars as they move through human populations and landscapes from Mexico to Argentina.
Howard Quigley, a friend and executive director of Panthera’s jaguar programme, said the cause of his death was lymphatic cancer. Rabinowitz was diagnosed with chronic lymphocytic leukemia in 2001. He lived in Mahopac, New York.
Rabinowitz, who had the reputation of a swashbuckler, travelled to jungles, rain forests and mountain tops. He mapped habitats diminished by development; negotiated with governments, some of them dictatorships, to provide safe land to preserve wild cats; and argued that their preservation meant saving whole ecosystems.
“He raised a lot of consciousness on behalf of wildlife, not just big cats,” said George Schaller, a prominent conservationist and member of Panthera’s science council. “He made people realise that these are beautiful animals and that they, and their habitats, are threatened and you have to fight for them.”
Alan Robert Rabinowitz was born in Brooklyn on December 31, 1953. His father, Frank, was a high school PE teacher, and his mother, Shirley (Felman), was a housewife.
His st utter led public schools in Far Rockaway, Queens, to put him into classes with children with Asperger’s syndrome, dyslexia, ADHD and other conditions. He had hypnosis and shock therapy and was given drugs.
“It made me realise that adults thought I was broken, so I gave up trying to communicate with them,” he told Publishers Weekly in 2014. “I have no memories of being able to speak without severe disfluency, and I remember a childhood filled with fear and pain.”
He found relief when he was 18, at a clinic in New York, where he learned to speak fluently. He graduated from Western Maryland College with a bachelor’s degree in biology and chemistry.
At the University of Tennessee, where he studied black bears, raccoons and bats, he earned a master’s and a PHD. He wrote his dissertation about the ecology of the raccoon in Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Rabinowitz was a research fellow at the Wildlife Conservation Society when Schaller, who was a top executive there, suggested that he go to Belize to study jaguars.
“He had a vision for himself that he hadn’t realised,” Schaller said. “When you meet someone like that you have to give him a try.”
That set Rabinowitz on a path of exploration and adventure, one that dealt with not only jaguars, lions and tigers. In Myanmar he discovered a previously unknown species of deer, the leaf muntjac, and in the Himalayas he met the last known Mongoloid pygmies in the world, the Taron.
Recalling his meeting with one pygmy, Rabinowitz said he had communicated nonverbally with him.
“He started making gestures about young children, which I didn’t quite understand,” he said in a 2013 interview. When he realised that the man had asked him why he had no children, Rabinowitz answered through a translator, “Why do you assume I have no children?”
The man replied: “Because you act like a man who still has this deep, deep hole inside of him.”
The conversation led him to think differently about his family and to decide with his wife, Salisa (Sathapanawath) Rabinowitz, to have children – a daughter, Alana, and a son, Alexander. They survive him, along with this sisters, Susan Klein and Sharon Zivi.
Some years after persuading the government of Belize to set up the jaguar preserve, the Cockscomb Basin Wildlife Sanctuary, Rabinowitz was walking through it when he saw the tracks of a large male. He began to follow it until it was getting dark – and realised it was lurking behind him.
“Soi squatted down andiw as hoping the jaguar would just walk off,” he said. “Although I loved watching it, I was also scared. And the jaguar just sat down. He just sits there on the trail I have to go back on. Sitting there, looking at me.”
Still uncertain how to proceed, Rabinowitz stood and fell on his back, thinking he was now easy prey. “The jaguar let out a guttural growl and walked toward the forest,” he said. “It turned and it looked back at me and our eyes met. And I remember that look so clearly from the cages in the cat house at the Bronx Zoo.” RICHARD SANDOMIR New York Times 2018. Distributed by NYT Syndication Service.