The animal looked and barked like a dogâalbeit one with long, pointed, foxlike earsâbut it also climbed bushes, a behavior more typical of the local Pampas fox, and it refused common dog food, preferring to eat rats.
Caretakers began to wonder if it might be a hybridâa mixture of domestic dog and some local wild canid. They contacted geneticists Thales Renato Ochotorena de Freitas from the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul and Rafael Kretschmer from the Universidade Federal de Pelotas who, last month, published a study confirming the animal was the worldâs first documented fox-dog. The finding excited and intrigued experts in animal genetics.
âWhat a strange hybrid beast!â wrote Roland Kays, a biologist with North Carolina State University and the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences, on X (formerly Twitter), alongside a photo of the creature and link to the study.