News Home

The year of 2015 marked the arrival of a critical water crisis in Brazil. Due to the drastic deforestation of the Amazon and Cerrado, it has stopped raining in the Southeast of Brazil! Martijn Van Rooij, former director at Citi Bank Brazil, is aware of that situation and supports the BJF. The video below was recorded on the dry bottom of one of São Paulo’s largest water reservoirs.

Projects such as the Araguaia Biodiversity Corridor are a sustainable answer to this crisis. By creating this Corridor, one of the largest South-American reforestation projects, we will help to recover the climatic role of rainforests in Brazil as well as halt biodiversity erosion.

Chris Tap is an award-winning sculptor with a passion for big cats. As a devoted member of our team, Chris is handcrafting 600 unique sculptures of the iconic black jaguar for the BJF. The sculptures are handed to each of the supporters of our THE LAST 600 campaign.

Chris Tap (b. 1973, Amsterdam) attended university where he studied economy and cultural anthropology, before he went to become a full time sculptor.

Tap is fascinated mostly by cats. The power they possess, the flexibility and grand style in which they move. Tap exhibited his works in art fairs globally.

In the last 12 years he developed his passion in an autodidact manner. Aside from studying anatomy Chris has spent a lot of time in zoos with live models of big cats.

 Chris came across the opportunity at the Amsterdam Zoo Artis to see cats from the closest distance possible, when they were given an anesthetic for medical reasons. Careful he measured up the big cats from every angle to the smallest details > the muscles, the bones, the eyes, how far is the distance between the eyes, etc. He took a close look at a jaguar called ‘Inaja’.

He is the second generation of artists in his family – his father Wim Tap was a well known artist in Holland which means Chris knows the craft from very close by since he was born.