No more stripes

I finally found a recent picture of the young mountain tapir rescued from the traffic at Huila region in Colombia. It was taken by Edna Fernanda Jimenez, the veterinarian in charge of this tapir. Now the tapir is an adult male that losses all the stripes that are used for camouflage when young. I still don’t know what’s going on with this animal, which was the first mountain tapir rescued from the traffic in decades here in Colombia. It is know that in some places along mountain tapir range people held mountain tapirs in their farms. Usually, a mother is hunted and her calf is captured and kept in the farm as a domestic animal, eating kitchen waste. I think that once the animal is big enough it’s probably killed for its meat. It’s urgently needed a national program focused on the rescue and research on mountain tapirs, probably the most endangered big mammal along Latin America.