Key Takeaways from Episode 2 of Rewilding Amazonia

• Defaunation — the slow emptying of wildlife from intact-looking forests — is one of the least visible and most devastating crises facing the Amazon. Scientists estimate between 350,000 and 1.25 million animals are trafficked in Peru alone every year, with official figures capturing as little as three percent of the actual trade.
• Magali Salinas founded Amazon Shelter in Puerto Maldonado after selling everything she owned. She now cares for 132 animals across 30 enclosures — a number that has more than doubled since the pandemic. Rehabilitating a single animal takes a minimum of three years, and the process is far more complex than most people realize.
• Mario Haberfeld founded Onçafari after retiring from twenty years as a Formula One driver. His team cracked the jaguar rewilding problem by removing all human contact from the rehabilitation process — and ten years later, they see the cubs and grandcubs of their first two releases almost every single day. The program has since expanded into the Amazon, where every jaguar released has survived.
• Brian Griffiths of OnePlanet and Georgetown University makes a counterintuitive case: that managed, legal, community-controlled hunting is one of the most powerful conservation tools available in the Amazon. The Maijuna Indigenous community has been stewarding a million-acre conservation area for generations. Give them a legal, sustainable income from that stewardship, and they can say no to logging companies and gold miners without sacrifice.
• In all of Loreto — millions of hectares of Peruvian Amazon — there are only three legal wildlife management plans. The gap between what the law intends and what communities can actually access remains one of the biggest unresolved problems in Amazonian conservation.

Ghost Forests and Grandcubs

From above, the heart of the Amazon forest can look completely intact — unbroken from horizon to horizon. But walk inside in some regions, and you might notice that there aren’t monkeys swinging above you. You walk for hours and never encounter a peccary. You bend down to look into the mud for tracks, but the mud is smooth without any signs of a passerby. The forest is standing, but the life inside is gone.

Scientists call this defaunation. I’ve started calling it something else: ghost forests.

Which makes what’s happening in one corner of the Brazilian wetlands so remarkable. Onçafari is a conservation nonprofit that began in the Pantanal and has since expanded into the Amazon, doing something that had never been successfully done before: returning captive-raised jaguars to the wild. I asked its founder, Mario Haberfeld, what it feels like now, more than a decade into that work.

Mario: “Pretty much every day, with guests, we see either the cubs or the grandcubs of those two jaguars that had been released. So it’s amazing to think that — if it wasn’t for this rewilding process — those jaguars wouldn’t even exist.”

Once wildlife disappears from the Amazon, can it come back? That’s what I set out to find out. This is Episode 2 of Rewilding Amazonia. I’m Brooke Mitchell. Let’s follow the trail.

The Front Line: Magali Salinas and Amazon Shelter

A City Without Wildlife

Puerto Maldonado sits at the confluence of two rivers in the Peruvian Amazon, one of the most biodiverse regions on earth. When Magali Salinas first visited more than twenty years ago, she went looking for wildlife — but didn’t find any.

Magali: “I want to see wild animals and I didn’t see nothing. So I begin to investigate what’s going on here. And then the people said that all the people go to the forest, eat the animals — all the animals being eating. And if you walk in three or four blocks, you can find monkeys, parrots, macaws as a pet in town. Always.”

Building What Wasn’t There

She went home, spent years learning zookeeping and wildlife trafficking from the inside while working with Lima’s ecological police, then returned to Puerto Maldonado and opened her rescue center, Amazon Shelter.

Magali: “One day I sold everything — my house, my car, all my things. And with that money I came here and I begin to build slowly. We beginning with two or three enclosures and now we have like thirty. Imagine. Before the pandemic, we were only 60 animals. Now we’re 132 animals after the pandemic. Never in my life. Never.”

One hundred and thirty-two animals across thirty enclosures — and that growth isn’t a success story so much as a measure of how much worse things have gotten.

Magali: “After the pandemic, things were worse. Life was more expensive, and for the people to go to the forest, shoot the animals, eat animals — it was more easy than getting meat or things like that. And selling animals was more easy also — get money easy.”

The Scale of Wildlife Trafficking

To better understand the wildlife trafficking crisis in the Amazon, I started digging into the numbers, and what I found was staggering. A group of scientists spent five years visiting 73 markets across 21 cities in Peru — totaling over 850 visits — and documented nearly 38,000 live wild animals from 193 species being openly sold. Shockingly, they estimated that they were only seeing between three and eleven percent of what was moving through the trade, which puts the real number somewhere between 350,000 and 1.25 million animals trafficked in Peru every year — and that’s just one country. And in another study, one vet clinic in Ecuador over five years documented 4.6 times more wildlife cases than the entire country’s official trafficking reports for the same period. If the official numbers are that far from reality, what are we actually dealing with here?

Magali: “The people usually go to the forest and shoot the mother, eat the mother, and bring the babies at home as a pet. These animals receive a wrong diet, and usually when we receive them, there are babies that have the liver very, very bad for the kind of food that they received. And most of them, they don’t survive.”

Fifty-Four Howler Monkeys

Magali has fifty-four howler monkeys in her care right now, and each one represents a mother killed in the forest. Howler monkeys are among the Amazon’s primary seed dispersers, carrying seeds kilometers from their source — so fifty-four animals in one rescue center in one Peruvian city is just as much an ecological story as it is an animal welfare story. For the animals that survive intake, rehabilitation takes a minimum of three years and begins with something that made my heart clench.

Magali: “We need to check the behavior part. We need to put in a group, trying to make it grow with a group. Because before, he was a human. The behavior is as a human. And in the case of howlers, they suffer a big depression when you make that change. We need to be very careful, because when the animal begins to get depressed, the immunology system goes down and they can die also.”

Where Safe Doesn’t Exist

After three or more years of rehabilitation, Magali then has to find somewhere safe to release these animals — and safe, in the part of the Amazon where she is based, is harder to find than you would expect. She doesn’t use protected reserves, because the evidence on the ground tells her she can’t trust them.

Magali: “In the jungle, it’s complicated — included the reserve. Illegal miners are getting in the reserve now. I was walking and I found bullets on the floor. That means that the people get into the reserve. I need to be really sure that if I release my animals they will be okay.”

Instead, she releases rehabilitated wildlife in private forestry concessions. It isn’t the solution anyone designed. But it works, and for Magali, working is enough.

Magali: “I usually travel before to the place that I want to release, and I go and study where is the place, if it’s safe — if there are no communities close, no people usually. The most perfect places to release are the private forestry concessions. Big places — 300,000 hectares. No community close. They protect the place, they don’t let people get in. They have 22 controls. When I stay there, I never heard a shot. I never heard people hunting.”

The Howler Monkey Who Came Back

Magali: “It’s a howler monkey. She was a female. She came with only mom — she was very abused. She had panic attacks, probably when they separated her from the mom. They killed the mom and they separated very strong. She remembers that. So all the time we had her with us, she would begin to scream and then bite in the face, very strong.

And then I begin to make a treatment, and it was getting better. And then I made a group — it was a really good group — and we released them in the forest.

After a year or two, we went back to check and monitor. I was walking with the veterinarian who always helps me, an Italian named Chris. And he said to me — there, no, it’s your howlers. They are moving.

And then I saw a monkey that came directly to me. And it was my monkey. The monkey with the panic attacks. She came very close to me — like three meters — and she stayed like twenty minutes, watching me and trying to say something. And then I began to cry. I tried to talk with her. I said to the vet — go, take the camera, we need to film this, she’s not moving.

She was pregnant. And she was staying and watching me, like trying to say: thanks. I’m here with my group. I’m pregnant. I’m safe. That was one or two years after the release. I began to call her name and cry a lot, and she stayed with me twenty minutes — and then she left with the group.”

A monkey who arrived at Amazon Shelter in a panic, biting and screaming, coming back two years later, pregnant and free — is everything this work is for. It doesn’t undo the fifty-four howler monkeys still in Magali’s care, or the mothers who were killed to bring them there, or the bullets she found on the floor of a protected reserve. But it is proof that the work is worth doing and that the forest, when given half a chance, can support the life returned to it.

The Apex: Mario Haberfeld and Onçafari

Why Jaguars

Jaguars are the apex predator of the Amazon — the largest big cat in the Americas, and one of the most ecologically important animals on earth. Remove the jaguar, and the effects ripple throughout the entire system. Scientists estimate that the protected areas of the Brazilian Amazon could support nearly 48,000 jaguars, but the actual number is far lower. Jaguars now occupy only half their historic range, pushed out by habitat loss, retaliation, and illegal hunting for traditional medicines. In some regions of the Amazon, scientists have found that professional hunters kill between 110 and 150 large cats each year.

From Formula One to the Forest

Mario: “I actually used to be a race car driver. I raced for over 20 years. But I’ve always had two passions in my life, which was racing and wildlife. And it got to a point in 2008 that I thought it was time to retire from racing and pursue this other passion of working with wildlife, with conservation.”

He spent two years after retirement traveling the world to see wildlife in its natural habitat. From that trip, an idea emerged. He’d seen what ecotourism had done in Africa — specifically at a lodge in South Africa where fifty years ago it had been nearly impossible to see leopards. A deliberate program of habituation — slowly acclimatizing the cats to the presence of vehicles — had transformed the lodge into one of the most celebrated wildlife destinations on earth, and in doing so had transformed the leopard from a pest to be hunted into an asset to be protected. Mario wanted to do the same thing in Brazil with jaguars. I asked him why this species.

Mario: “The most important reason is that jaguars are on the top of the food chain. By protecting the jaguar, really what you’re doing is not just jaguar — it’s trying to protect the whole biome. Jaguars used to exist all the way from southern USA to southern Argentina. Nowadays they only occupy 50% of their original home range. About 60% of the jaguars left in the world are in Brazil, mainly in the Amazon and in the Pantanal. And if you have jaguars in that place, it means that place is a healthy habitat.”

The Habituation Program

A healthy habitat indicator and an umbrella species for an entire biome. The ecotourism results in the Pantanal, where Onçafari began, made the economic case just as clearly.

Mario: “Before Onçafari, they used to have two or three sightings of jaguars a year. Nowadays, for the last five years we’ve been getting between 1,000 and 1,200 sightings a year, and pretty much between 99 and 100 percent of guests in the last five years have seen at least a jaguar during their stay — normally a lot more.”

From two or three sightings a year to over a thousand. That transformation — making jaguars reliably visible, and in doing so making them economically valuable to the communities around them — is still the foundation of everything Onçafari does. But it wasn’t where the story ended.

The Rewilding Program Begins by Accident

Mario: “More by chance than planned, we started a rewilding front. Because there was an incident — they tried to capture a mother jaguar with two little cubs, and by a lot of different mistakes, the mother ended up dying. So they were left with two little jaguar cubs, and we thought, well, we don’t want them to spend the rest of their lives in a zoo.”

Every previous attempt to rewild captive-raised jaguars had failed, not because the animals couldn’t hunt, but because they’d become too attached to people during captivity. Onçafari had to crack that problem from scratch.

Mario: “The most important thing that we learned — when we constructed this huge enclosure in the Pantanal and put the jaguars there, the first challenge was learning how to feed them. How they would perceive something else as food. In the beginning it was very hard. And then we learned that they needed to fast for a few days before they would hunt again. And then we did like a video game where they had to achieve certain steps to move on to the next one. They started hunting small animals, then females, then males, from capybaras to caimans all the way to the end, when they were hunting white-lipped peccaries, which can be quite dangerous for them. But the main thing was that they couldn’t see that we were the ones putting the prey inside the enclosure. For them it was like a miracle — suddenly something appeared, and they had to hunt.”

The Grandcubs

Ten years after those first two cubs were released in the Pantanal, the results speak for themselves.

Mario: “Pretty much every day, with guests, we see either the cubs or the grandcubs of those two jaguars that had been released. So it’s amazing to think that — if it wasn’t for this rewilding process — those jaguars wouldn’t even exist.”

Expanding into the Amazon

That’s the Pantanal program, where everything started. But what happens when you try to do the same thing in the Amazon — in a forest so dense you can barely see ten meters ahead of you?

Mario: “We’ve done an enclosure in the Amazon that’s huge — two hectares with very dense forest. We had to do it that way in order not to cut any big trees, so we kept deviating and that’s how big it ended up. That made our job difficult in the beginning because we would let the jaguar go in there and could never find it again. We released already a few females, and last year we released the first male in the Amazon. So far every jaguar we released has been very successful. In the Amazon it’s much harder to follow what happened — it’s very dense, hard to see them. They get released with a satellite collar so we know if it worked or not. We know they survived, they hunted and everything, for the two years the collar worked. But I would say they survived just like any other wild jaguar would.”

A program that began in the Pantanal and has now taken root in the Amazon, expanding across four Brazilian biomes — and in Mario’s mind, there’s no reason to stop there.

No Passports Required

Mario: “Jaguars don’t show their passports. They just cross borders.”

It’s a simple observation, but it captures something true about conservation at this scale — the problems don’t stop at borders, and neither can the solutions. Mario started by wanting to see a jaguar. Fifteen years later, he and his team have built something that spans four countries and shows no sign of stopping.

Mario: “You can’t lose hope. You have always to be optimistic, otherwise everything you do doesn’t go the right way. But I think the main thing is seeing the results. Everything we’ve done so far worked — quicker or took a long time, but in the end of the day it worked, and we can see the impact we’ve been creating. We need to leave this world for the next generation. It’s not fair that our generation destroyed it and leaves everything destroyed for the next generation.”

The Counterintuitive Answer: Brian Griffiths and the Maijuna

Finding His Spark

Brian is a faculty member at Georgetown University, the president of a nonprofit called the Amazon Center for Environmental Education and Research, and the director of conservation science at OnePlanet, where he works directly with Indigenous communities in the Peruvian Amazon.

Brian: “I got connected with somebody that was doing conservation work and I thought, that sounds pretty cool. And I had this image in my head of being like a wildlife biologist, even though my degree was not preparing me to do that. So I started reaching out to nonprofit organizations looking for internships. And I remember around that time people telling me — oh, you know, running around in the rainforest, swimming in the ocean, those aren’t real jobs. Nobody’s going to pay you to do those things. And I just remember thinking: I’m willing to compete for those. I’ve never felt that spark before.”

He found that spark — and has spent his career since in the Amazon, working at the intersection of conservation science and Indigenous community rights. He told me that one of the most powerful conservation tools available in the Amazon right now is hunting. Managed, legal, community-controlled hunting. And to understand why, you first have to understand the Maijuna.

Who Are the Maijuna?

The Maijuna are one of the most vulnerable Indigenous communities remaining in the Amazon — fewer than 600 individuals, living in four communities in the northeastern Peruvian Amazon, near the border with Colombia. They are situated around a regional conservation area called the Maijuna-Kichwa, which encompasses roughly a million acres of what Brian describes as primary, pristine rainforest — about twenty-two percent larger than Yosemite National Park. A team of western scientists has visited the center of that area only once, in the early 2000s. What’s there, in terms of species diversity, is still largely unknown. For centuries, the Maijuna have depended on that forest for everything — protein, shelter, medicine, culture. But in the early 2000s, something happened that nearly brought it all to an end.

The Logging Invasion

Brian: “There were a bunch of loggers that invaded the ancestral lands of the Maijuna. And they set up logging camps deep, deep in the forest. And at those logging camps, the loggers only hunted for food. And so they had one or two professional hunters who would go out in the forest every day and find enough protein to feed everyone. And over the course of about ten, fifteen years, the loggers essentially killed every edible animal in the rainforest. And they were fishing, but they were using fish poison. And so all the fish were dying, and that poison was flowing down the river to where the Maijuna live, and killing the food security of the Maijuna as well. And so by about 2010, the Maijuna were starting to starve. They talk of that time and they say that they were eating frogs because their children were hungry.”

A community reduced to eating frogs in a million-acre rainforest — that’s what defaunation looks like at the human level. And the Maijuna’s response to it was to mobilize politically, form a federation, evict the loggers after a long and violent period of resistance, and successfully petition the government to establish the regional conservation area. Since then, mammal populations have been rebounding, and the Maijuna — who have been living inside that forest for generations — are managing the recovery themselves, not as beneficiaries of a conservation program, but as the active stewards of a landscape they never stopped belonging to.

The Wildlife Management Plan

Now Brian and OnePlanet are working with the Maijuna to obtain a legal wildlife management plan — a policy instrument under Peruvian law that would allow them to legally harvest and sell specific wild game species from their conservation area. The species in question are carefully selected for their resilience: paca, collared peccary, red brocket deer — animals with high enough reproductive rates to sustain a controlled harvest without drawing down the population. And the ecological logic behind why this works starts with what’s happening at the center of the conservation area, where almost no one ever goes.

Brian: “All populations of mammals in a healthy system — their populations increase exponentially, but only to a specific point. And that point really is the carrying capacity of the ecosystem. There’s only a certain number of fruit trees, there’s only a certain number of mineral licks in the Amazon that’ll support a specific number of each of these animals. So that abundance — for a tapir, for instance — that carrying capacity might be as low as four tapirs per square kilometer. And animals don’t know where the limit is. So when they experience exponential growth in their populations, typically they’ll shoot way over carrying capacity. Once the population passes that carrying capacity point, suddenly there’s not enough food to go around. And so that tapir, that’s hungry, faces a choice — compete for the little food that exists, starve, or go somewhere else where there might be more food. And so basic ecological theory is that if there’s an area nearby where there’s plenty of food — because tapirs have been hunted — the tapirs from the healthy areas will move into those depleted areas. As long as those two systems are connected, the source connected to what we call the sink, there’s a continuous supply of animals coming in. The center of this conservation area — which is so remote the Maijuna even rarely go there — is definitely at carrying capacity for each of these species. And so the connectivity of those areas means the Maijuna can hunt as much as they can possibly eat, and they will not deplete the ecosystem of mammals.”

The center of the conservation area functions as a permanent reservoir — so full of animals that they naturally flow outward into the areas where the Maijuna hunt. As long as that connectivity holds, the harvest is self-replenishing. The ecology works. But Brian told me the second argument for managed hunting is the one that matters most for the long-term survival of the forest itself — and it’s written not in population dynamics, but in economics.

Conservation as Economic Sovereignty

Brian: “If your family is starving and you don’t have any source of income, and a logging company comes knocking on your door and says we’re willing to give you 2,000 soles and 200 gallons of gasoline right now — all we need is ten hectares of your forest — that’s a pretty good deal, because you have hundreds of thousands of hectares of forest. Ten? No big deal. You might feel pressure to sign that contract, to sign away the inheritance of your children. But if their pockets are already full, the Maijuna can laugh them out of the room. They can say, no thank you — we are rich already. We don’t need to sell our timber to commercial logging companies. We don’t need to contract with gold miners to destroy our rivers in exchange for pocket change.”

That framing — conservation as economic self-sufficiency rather than sacrifice — is what Brian means when he talks about community-based conservation. The Maijuna aren’t being asked to protect their forest out of altruism. They’re being given the tools to earn a sustainable income from the stewardship they’re already doing, so that when the extractive industries come knocking — and they always come knocking — the answer can be no.

The System That’s Failing Them

But here’s where the story gets complicated. Obtaining a legal wildlife management plan under Peruvian law is not simple. It requires years of scientific data collection on species densities — painstaking, expensive, technically complex work that requires NGO partnerships, grant funding, and sustained scientific presence that most Indigenous communities in the Amazon don’t have access to. Brian has been working with the Maijuna for years, One Planet has poured significant resources into the effort, and they are still not there yet.

Brian: “This effort — even collaborating with NGOs and scientists — has taken years and years and years, and funding and grants. I lived there for 13 months. An immense effort. And so if every community doesn’t have those NGO connections, doesn’t have scientists that are willing to spend their careers pursuing wildlife management goals, how are they ever going to get this accomplished? In all of Loreto — of which there are millions of hectares of rainforest — I think there are only three management plans.”

Three management plans in millions of hectares of rainforest — which tells you how difficult the system makes it for communities like the Maijuna to formalize what they’re already doing sustainably. Meanwhile, the commercial bushmeat trade in cities like Iquitos operates largely outside any regulatory framework, supplied not by Indigenous subsistence hunters but by commercial networks that no management plan was ever designed to reach. The gap between what the law intends and what communities can actually access remains one of the biggest unresolved problems in Amazonian conservation.

Conservation vs. Preservation

Brian: “Conservation and preservation are not the same thing. If I have my favorite chocolate bar and I’m trying to preserve it, I put it in the freezer and I forget about it, and I pass it on to my kid when I die. But if I’m trying to conserve it, I use it bit by bit and save it for as long as possible. The Maijuna are interested in conserving their mammals — these are things that they need to use. That use is written in thousands of years of cultural history, written into their very livelihoods, written into their connection with the forest. The idea is that they want that use to be sustainable, and they want it in a management scheme that allows them to also earn money.”

That distinction — conservation rather than preservation, use rather than untouchability — is one that western conservation has been slow to embrace, and one that the Maijuna have understood for generations. The evidence says their model works. The question is whether the systems around them will catch up in time.

What It Takes

This episode was built around one question: can wildlife come back to the ghost forests of the Amazon? The answer is yes — and it’s already happening, piece by piece, in rescue centers, rewilding enclosures, and Indigenous communities across the Amazon. But this work can’t stay small. It needs connected landscapes, intact corridors, and real space for these animals to move through. And that’s exactly where this journey is going next.

Coming Up in Episode 3

Those jaguar grandcubs need somewhere to go. In Episode 3, we investigate the fragmentation of Amazonian landscapes — the roads, cleared land, and encroaching settlements that are severing the connections wildlife depends on — and the people working to reconnect what’s been broken. Featuring Juliana Martins on road ecology and landscape connectivity, Ben Valks of the Black Jaguar Foundation on the Araguaia Corridor, and Bruno Paladines of Nature and Culture International on Ecuador’s Amazon platform.