Camera traps catch domestic dogs attacking endangered mountain tapirs in Colombian cloud forests

Deep in the high Andean cloud forests of Colombia, camera traps have captured something conservationists had long feared but never before documented in the country: domestic dogs chasing and biting mountain tapirs, one of South America’s most endangered large mammals. The photographic evidence, collected in a protected area of the Central Andes, offers the first confirmed record of dog attacks on mountain tapirs (Tapirus pinchaque) in Colombia and adds a troubling new dimension to the mounting list of threats facing this globally Endangered herbivore.

The findings come from a survey conducted in the northern part of the Campoalegre Soil Conservation District, near the municipality of Santa Rosa de Cabal in the department of Risaralda. The study site, a 7.32-square-kilometre expanse recently acquired by the Danish NGO WILD Nature Foundation, sits in a landscape scarred by decades of cattle ranching. Patches of montane cloud forest and secondary vegetation are interspersed with vast grasslands in early regeneration, all threaded by rivers and streams. The nearest town lies 10.6 kilometres away, connected by a single dirt road that crosses the reserve, and a few isolated households nearby are mainly inhabited by transient families of cowboys hired to guard cattle — households that inevitably bring dogs with them.

Between 16 September and 24 November 2023, researchers deployed 20 camera traps stratified by cloud forest cover, with an average linear spacing of 569 metres and a total sampling effort of 1,279 trap-nights. The cameras, set to take three pictures and a 15-second video whenever an animal crossed the detection field, were installed 0.3 to 0.4 metres above the ground along natural wildlife trails and streams. The grid was designed to monitor terrestrial vertebrate diversity with a focus on threatened species, and besides mountain tapirs it detected other imperilled mammals including the Andean bear, the dwarf red-brocket deer, the clouded tiger cat and the mountain coati.

Over the survey period the cameras recorded 585 detections of mountain tapirs — and 27 of domestic dogs. Within that tally, two events stood out. On 28 October 2023, at 08:02 in the early morning, the cameras captured both dogs — one black, one white — biting a living adult mountain tapir on its hind-limbs. The photograph’s angle did not reveal observable wounds or other injuries, but the physical contact was unmistakable. On 6 November 2023, before dawn at 04:11, a single frame showed an adult tapir running across the detection field. Three minutes later the white dog sprinted past, and 37 seconds after that the black dog crossed the frame with its head and nose close to the ground, tracking the tapir’s scent. The two sampling stations were separated by 1.72 kilometres, and the researchers identified the same two dogs in both encounters.

Mountain tapirs are listed as Endangered on the IUCN Red List both worldwide and in Colombia, with populations declining due to habitat loss and poaching. Most of the species’ geographic range lies in Colombia, roughly 28,000 square kilometres, compared with about 21,000 square kilometres in Ecuador and 1,830 square kilometres in Peru — yet until now, evidence confirming negative impacts of dogs on the species in Colombia has been lacking. The Status and Action Plan for the Mountain Tapir had highlighted as far back as 1997 that packs of feral dogs could potentially kill mountain tapirs in Ecuador, and camera-trap studies in the Tropical Andes have shown that tapirs and Andean bears increase diurnal vigilance and decrease occupancy at sites with intense dog activity. Direct attacks, however, had never been photographed in Colombia.

The researchers stress that these are not isolated incidents. Local people had previously reported the same dogs chasing and attacking mountain tapirs and cattle in the area. Equally worrying, no juvenile mountain tapirs were detected in the survey, nor in recent monitoring efforts in 2021. Juvenile tapirs are more vulnerable to dog attacks than adults, and more information will be needed to determine whether the absence of young animals reflects direct pressures such as predation and chasing, indirect pressures such as risk perception, or other environmental predictors.

Tapirs are particularly susceptible to disturbance from dogs because, unlike large carnivores or horned ungulates, they lack additional defensive weaponry beyond their sheer body size — no large canines, elongated claws or horns. The evolutionary mismatch runs deeper still. In this broken Andean landscape, mountain tapirs evolved alongside non-cursorial predators such as pumas and Andean bears, ambush hunters morphologically adapted to short strikes rather than sustained pursuit. Escaping from a cursorial predator built to sustain prolonged runs, such as the domestic dog, imposes an anaerobic cost on tapirs, increasing their vulnerability to predation by fatigue or mortality from incidental falls. Comparable attacks have been documented on lowland tapirs in the Atlantic Forest, where a juvenile was found seriously injured after being bitten multiple times along its head, limbs and tail, and on guanacos and pudus in the Southern Andes of Chile.

If the interaction continues, consequences could cascade from the individual to the population level. Individual tapirs face increased vigilance and fear-induced stress, reduced foraging efficiency, disrupted social interactions and elevated mortality from injuries and disease. Populations risk altered reproductive performance, greater potential for disease transmission and shifts in activity patterns and habitat use. The disease threat is not hypothetical: in 1994, a re-introduced two-year-old radio-tracked female mountain tapir in Ecuador was found killed by rabies contracted from the bite of an infected feral dog. Even a single pack of two or three dogs, the authors argue, appears capable of posing a serious threat to a large, highly threatened mammal — a conclusion that contrasts with a recent study in the Western Andes of Colombia that found no evidence of dogs meaningfully changing forest mammals’ habitat use.

Conservation responses, the researchers say, must begin with population management and control of domestic dogs inside and around protected areas. Recommended measures include capture-neuter-vaccinate-release programmes for stray dogs and organised campaigns with local residents to neuter and vaccinate owned dogs in the reserve’s vicinity, implemented permanently rather than episodically. Continued camera-trap monitoring should document feral dog presence and attacks on wildlife, with the findings shared publicly through environmental outreach and social media. Understanding how the surrounding matrix and anthropogenic pressures such as tourism create conditions for dogs to establish inside protected areas will be essential for designing effective mitigation with the help of local authorities.

The stakes extend well beyond a single species. Domestic dogs are recognised globally as a form of anthropogenic edge effect, contributing to at least 11 documented vertebrate extinctions and threatening another 188 imperilled species worldwide — a toll thought to be underestimated. If dog invasion into mountain tapir habitat is not properly managed, the researchers warn, the problem could scale to local extinctions of tapir populations and spread to other imperilled species in the region, from the dwarf red-broket deer to the Northern pudu. The demise of mountain tapirs in the Andean cloud forests, they conclude, could unravel substantial losses in the function and structure of this vital ecosystem, compromising the welfare of the human societies that depend on it.

Subject of Research: First camera-trap documentation of domestic dog attacks on endangered mountain tapirs in Andean cloud forests of Colombia

Article Title: Howling shadows: First report of domestic dog attacks on globally threatened mountain tapirs in high Andean cloud forests of Colombia

Article References: Cepeda-Duque, J. C., Arango-Correa, E., Frimodt-Møller, C., & Lizcano, D. J. (2024). Howling shadows: First report of domestic dog attacks on globally threatened mountain tapirs in high Andean cloud forests of Colombia. Neotropical Biology and Conservation, 19(1), 25-33. https://doi.org/10.3897/neotropical.19.e117437

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3897/neotropical.19.e117437

Keywords: mountain tapir, domestic dogs, camera traps, Colombia, Andean cloud forests, wildlife conservation, endangered species, human-wildlife conflict, protected areas, edge effect, disease transmission, Neotropics