The jaguar from Juiz de Fora

Last year in my city, after 80 years without a single record, appeared suddenly, walking freely during the night in the botanical garden park of my city, a magnificent specimen of Onça-pintada (Panthera onca), a Brazilian jaguar, the largest feline of the Americas.

And yes, this is a real story and this event took over the conversations on the streets, in bars, in lines at bakeries and on social media.

However, we, the mineiros (people who are born and live in the State of Minas Gerais, Brazil), always have our peculiar ways of telling our stories. It was then that, after 17 days, when the jaguar was finally captured and sent to a nature reserve so that it could live in a suitable environment, the writer Fernanda Bittar, a writer from Minas Gerais based in France, decided to send me her version of facts in the form of a charming, playful and humorous text, composed of rhyming verses, which I had the great pleasure of illustrating.