He soon received a fellowship from the Wildlife Conservation Society – then the New York Zoological Society – and became a researcher, with an office not far from the jaguar cage at the Bronx Zoo. It was Schaller, who met Rabinowitz while visiting Tennessee, who suggested he begin studying jaguars in Belize. At the University of Tennessee, he received a master’s degree in ecology in 1978 and a doctorate in ecology in 1981, focusing on the endangered gray bat before shifting his research to racoons in Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Rabinowitz overcame his stutter while studying biology and chemistry at Western Maryland College (now McDaniel College) in Westminster, Maryland, where he graduated in 1974. They were like me, trapped inside a cage not of their making.” All I knew is that these cats made me feel whole. “I had no idea what I would be in life or that I would ever work on jaguars. “And I would never leave that enclosure without promising the cats that if I ever found my voice, I would try to be their voice and help them,” he continued.

So I would go to the bars, wait until nobody was around, and talk to the jaguar – tell it my hopes and dreams, whether it was a bad day at school or how stupid I felt people were because they didn’t try to understand me. But the jaguar would mostly stay quiet, watching everybody pass by, in a world of its own.

“All the other cats would charge at the bars or vocalise. “I would always be drawn to this one cage, with a solitary jaguar,” he told National Geographic in 2014. Born in Brooklyn in the early Fifites, and raised in Queens, Alan Robert Rabinowitz recalled that as a boy how he was often taken to the Bronx Zoo by his father, a physical-education teacher who served as an army paratrooper in the Second World War.

Jaguar by Alan Rabinowitz