Interview with Alan Rabinowitz
What path led you to become a conservationist? Do you have a single most influential or defining moment when you knew that you had to take action to try and protect big cats?
The path I took to becoming a conservationist is perhaps a strange one because as a young person growing up, I wasn’t surrounded by animals. I grew up in New York City and didn’t even see a cow in a field until I went to college. As a child I had a very bad stutter and would get a complete block when trying to talk to people. At school I was labelled as having special educational needs; the adult world had classified me as broken and as a result I just stopped talking.
However, after school I would return home, gather my pets (a menagerie including a snake, hamster, turtle and chameleon) and the words would pour out. I could talk to animals, let off my frustration at how stupid humans were and say everything I wanted to say. They listened and would react, and while I knew they didn’t understand, they did feel and respond to my emotions. I realised that people mistreated animals, just down to forgetting to feed their pets, and I realised that animals were disrespected by humans as they had no voice. If they could talk they wouldn’t be treated the way that they often are by humans. I socialised by bonding with animals and when things were bad my father would take me to the Bronx Zoo. I would always head straight for the Great Cat House. I strongly felt that these hugely powerful beasts, who could easily kill humans, were locked up purely because they had no human voice. If they could talk they wouldn’t be in that situation, they wouldn’t choose to be caged. I was always drawn to the jaguar enclosure where one solitary jaguar would pace around his cage. I would sit and whisper to this jaguar, outpouring all my emotions, and I promised that if one day I found my voice I would become their voice. I could see their feeling, emotion and consciousness, but like me, they were unable to talk.