In 1986, a biologist with a severe stutter persuaded Belize to create the world's first jaguar preserve, then he envisioned a 5,000-mile wildlife corridor

As a child, Alan Rabinowitz stuttered so badly he could barely finish a sentence. Rabinowitz told Claudia Dreifus in a December 2007 New York Times interview that this stutter was what first drew him to conservation, because animals never judged how he spoke. Decades later, that boy who talked to pets instead of people would help change how governments think about protecting wild cats.

A childhood spent talking to animals, not people