Seu Joaquim and the other cowboys were excited that I was photographing and filming and that I would ultimately show my work in Rio de Janeiro. He explained that the animal had got lost in an invernada (pasture area) and had "turned bagual".ĭuring the time I spent on the farm, I tried to learn more about handling practices and the routine of cowboys by closely following their work with cattle. In one of them, there is a skinny well-grown calf tied up in the back of a tractor. Then, another picture of Seu Joaquim with the jaguar, one of him butchering a cow, then riding a buffalo and finally some images of cowboys working the cattle. "Small" - he laughed - "but it came out well in the picture". In one of the images, he posed with a jaguar that had been captured for the research project. We were talking in the cafeteria, and Seu Joaquim had brought a small photo album to show me. The only direct reference to an animal that fits this category, in my field notes, was a photograph that belonged to the foreman of Santo Antônio Farm, Seu Joaquim.
In conversations and interviews for my research, bagual was defined as "loose", "unbranded" and "no man's" cattle that "lives in the bush". "Bagual" is currently very rare and possibly extinct in the wetlands of the rivers Miranda and Abobral, the area where the Santo Antônio Farm is located, but its presence persists in the cowboys' memory. This kind of cattle, according to him, liked 'capões' with denser vegetation, such as the "aguaçuzá". Altino had been raised on another farm, the Bodoquena, one of the largest and best-known properties in southern Pantanal, where he had contact with bagual cattle. She "runs hard" and then she is "caught with a rope" like a heifer. The narrative refers to the time when the great-grandmother of the narrator was still young. My proposal was to investigate the relationship between scientific field practices and the knowledge practices of cowboys and residents of Pantanal farms (Süssekind 2010, 2012, 2014). The research was carried out on cattle farms hosting Conservation Biology studies on jaguars (Panthera onca).
The farm, located in the municipality of Corumbá, was the headquarters of a scientific project investigating the behavior of jaguars, and one of the bases of my fieldwork 5 5 In this article I chose to use fictitious names for the farm and my interlocutors.įarm's cowboys, narrated the case to me in June 2008. But they say that after a month she passed away. They looked after her, brought her to church and everything and she came back to normal. Then they threw another rope, everybody came and they caught her. He threw his rope around her, pulled it tight. Only this one guy caught up, almost in the forest. But they say she ran hard, you know? The horse had to sweat to catch up with her.
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