A Texas man and his wife were arrested after allegedly selling a margay kitten and trying to sell a jaguar cub in a second deal, federal authorities said.
Rafael Gutierrez-Galvan, 29, and his wife Deyanira Garza, 28, whom prosecutors describe as “legal permanent residents,” sold the margay cub for $7,500 to an undercover agent, meeting him in the parking lot of a Texas sporting goods store on Aug. 24. On Sept. 26 Gutierrez-Galvan made plans to sell the jaguar cub to the same man, and agents arrested him and his wife en route to the meet-up, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Texas.
Gutierrez-Galvan and Garza face federal charges under the new Big Cat Public Safety Act, which was signed into law in 2022. They can be sentenced to a maximum of five years in federal prison and ordered to pay a $20,000 fine if convicted.
Prosecutors did not say how the couple obtained the two wild cats or if they were working with anyone else.
Jaguars are endangered and margays are threatened. Both are native to South America, although jaguars once ranged as far north as Ohio and Pennsylvania. Margays (leopardus wiedii) are small arboreal wildcats who thrive in the deep jungle, away from human interference. They’re typically smaller than domestic cats, with an average weight of six pounds, and are among the most sure-footed of all felid species.
Jaguars (panthera onca) are true big cats and the only extant big cat species native to the Americas. They’re under enormous pressure from Chinese poachers, who capture and kill them to use their body parts in traditional Chinese “medicine,” as well as local illegal wildlife poachers. Both jaguars and margays, as well as other cat species native to South America, are also endangered by habitat loss.
Header image of a margay in Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil, credit: Anderson Cristiano Hendgen via Wikimedia Commons
New York cat wins Hambone Award for most ridiculous pet insurance claim
The Hambone Award was started in 2009 when a family filed a pet insurance claim for their dog who got trapped in a refrigerator, suffered mild hypothermia and tried to make the best of the situation by eating an entire ham.
That inspired the Veterinary Pet Insurance Company, a subsidiary of Nationwide, to create the award and make it an annual event. The first recipient of the “honor” was Lulu, an English bulldog who ate 15 baby pacifiers, a bottle cap and part of a basketball, necessitating a trip to the veterinarian and an insurance claim.
This year the award went to Giles, a handsome black kitty who has a habit of hiding in a sofa bed and getting stuck there when one of his humans folds the bed back into the couch. His humans, Kaitlyn and Reid, always check to make sure Giles isn’t in the space beneath the bed when they fold it up, and had warned Reid’s visiting parents that the playful cat likes to hang out there, but they forgot to check and ended up smooshing Giles.
Luckily the little guy didn’t break any bones, but he did take a hit to the face pretty hard and needed stitches.
“I [had] no idea what’s going on—we got him in his carrier and ran him up the street,” Reid said. “Luckily, we have a wonderful vet hospital just around the corner from us, so we were able to take him right there. Fortunately, it wasn’t too bad. He did need some stitches … but he was the model patient, as he always is.”
Giles’ competition this year was mostly dogs, but the other feline finalist was Miko, a New Orleans cat who spotted a pair of doves nesting in a hanging plant just outside on the patio. Miko executed a Jordanesque leap and swatted at the doves, but as the birds fled one of them gave the bold cat a parting gift, pecking Miko in the face. Thankfully he wasn’t seriously injured.
For his exploits, Giles received a trophy and his humans will receive a gift card and a donation in their name to the pet charity of their choice.
Pain In The Bud 
Hmm. What are the chances these garbage who sell animals like this will not be punished? I prefer garbage like this get attacked by a wild animal. Like the elephant who killed poacher in Africa.
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A bunch of poachers got eaten by lions on a reserve not that long ago, within the past year IIRC.
If these two are convicted, they’ll serve time. It’s not enough, but better than nothing.
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Yes. Better than nothing. And i could be here all day with stories of animals killing poachers. Makes my day when i hear about them.
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I think I need to apply for a Hambone award: when I was 4 years old, my mother was fixing the Thanksgiving turkey and our cat, Rosie, was meowing for a taste. I begged Mother to give her a scrap, but Mother wouldn’t do it. Then she put the turkey in the refrigerator and left. I opened the fridge, picked Rosie up, and put her in the fridge with the turkey.
When my mother got back a couple of hours later to put the turkey in the oven, she found the cat chewing on the tailbone, known in our family as the “pope’s nose,” and screamed. Later she said that the damage wasn’t as bad as it might be, given what Rosie ate.
No hypothermia observed.
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I can’t imagine a cat could eat that much of a whole turkey…well, except maybe for Bud…but I absolutely can imagine the cat licking it, putting her face all over it, getting it covered in fur and making it a total loss.
Even if they don’t want to eat something, they sure do love putting their faces in food.
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My comment echoes Gilda. Punishment is pitiful. Fines are for the few who are caught and hardly enforced. They can simply get the hell out of dodge and start again. It’s difficult Not to wish a painful immediate death on them…
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It’s good that the Big Cat Public Safety Act was passed, but there’s still a lot of work to do and the penalties are not enough.
Still, they will be felons if they are convicted, and if the feds put this much effort into getting those two, surely they are eyeing the people on the other end who stole the cubs from the wild and transported them to the US.
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I really dislike furniture that folds up, like lazi- boy type stuff. Glad that kitty came out okay, poor little kitty. Terrible about those jerks selling wild animals. I read long ago that the black market in exotic animals is the third largest worldwide. Makes you wonder what’s wrong with people.
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I’ve seen videos of the open-air animal markets in places like Indonesia, and they’re horror shows.
The New York Times has covered the extreme threats to jaguars from the traditional Chinese medicine trade. They’ve killed almost all the tigers for their body parts and continue to go after the handful still left in the wild, but to feed demand they’ve gone all-in on African lions and jaguars. There are people working hard to stop the poachers, but poaching for the TCM trade is probably the greatest threat right now.
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