Deforestation piles pressure on elusive Chacoan peccary

With just 3,000 of the pig-like animals still roaming the Gran Chaco region, acommunity conservation effort is fighting for its future

- Patrick Greenfield

The Chacoan peccary is so elusive that scientists believed it was extinct until its “discovery” in 1975. Today, only 3,000 remain in the inhospitable forests and lagoons of the Gran Chaco region, which stretches across northern Argentina, Paraguay and southern Bolivia, and comprises more than 50 different ecosystems.

Micaela Camino, who works with the Indigenous Wichí and Criollo communities to protect the animals and their land rights in Argentina, knows how difficult to find they can be. She has only seen one Chacoan peccary, or quimilero, in 13 years since she set up her NGO, Proyecto Quimilero, but has fallen in love with the critically endangered mammal, which looks like a peculiar cross between a boar and a hedgehog.

“I was told that the Chacoan peccary was extinct outside protected areas when I first started,” said Camino. “ So when we found it, I thought it was great. We set up monitoring to find more in one of the most isolated parts of the dry Chaco. But then the loggers started to come.”

The Gran Chaco, South America’s second-largest forest after the Amazon, is one of the most deforested places on Earth. Every month, more than 344 sq km is lost, cleared for vast soya farms and cattle ranches that export to markets in the US, China and Europe – including UK supermarkets, according to a joint Guardian investigation in 2019. However, the loss is largely ignored on the international stage, receiving little conservation money or celebrity attention in comparison with the Amazon.