Mysterious Bush Dogs to Be Bred: Behind the Elusive Species
Camera traps miss them. Local indigenous people hear but don’t see them. Weighing in at about 10 pounds (4.5 kilograms) and resembling little bears, they’re among the cutest ninjas in the wild world.
“The biggest problem with studying them is that they spend almost half their day underground in burrows … You can be walking right over a bush dog and not know it,” said Karen DeMatteo, a National Geographic grantee and biologist at the Washington University in St. Louis and the Saint Louis Zoo WildCare Institute. She has been studying bush dogs since 1998.
“There are people who have camera traps out—hundreds of camera traps. Out of thousands of thousands of photos, they might get one photo of a bush dog,” DeMatteo said. One colleague of hers has had camera traps set up for over a decade and has never gotten a picture of one. (See a rare picture of bush dogs taken in 2008.)
Elusive though it may be, the bush dog is considered near threatened by the International Union for Conservation of Nature and vulnerable in Brazil—and this has spurred some to act.
http://newswatch.nationalgeographic.com/2013/11/04/mysterious-bush-dogs-to-be-bred-behind-the-elusive-species/
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and eat big South American rodents, mainly.
