La Feria Ocelot & Brush Clearing – 1949

Source: The Brownsville Herald – August 21, 1949, p. 11

For most of the 20th century most peoples’ knee-jerk reaction to seeing a predator was to kill it without thinking twice. This is a sad story about an ocelot shot by a man who worked for a land clearing company.

In the 20th century a massive amount of brush was cleared to convert the landscape into farms and ranches, with little regard for wildlife. This brush country was prime habitat for ocelots, which surely resulted in the collapse of the species in Texas that we face today. The following headline from 1965 shows the scale of transformation the landscape faced.