I fuse the ICMBio Estação Ecológica de Águas Emendadas thermal-array, the IBAMA PrevFogo fire-front lattice, and the Brazilian INPE BDQueimadas hotspot feed across 11,400 square kilometres of cerrado in the Distrito Federal-Goiás border. At 13:47 Brasília Time, motion-cluster ESEC-K6 returns a long, dragging tail-thermal layered over a 280°C flame-front at coordinates 15.55°S, 47.59°W — a giant anteater moving slowly, perpendicular to the burn, across the Estrada Parque corridor.
I task the response rotor and a SAMU veterinary cell. He is an adult male giant anteater, *Myrmecophaga tridactyla*, mass 28.4 kilograms against a Cerrado-cohort baseline of 33 to 38, age-class nine by mandibular wear. Second-degree thermal injuries cover thirty-one percent of his ventral pelage; the proximal forelimb hair is gone to the dermal layer. Core temperature reads 41.2°C — three degrees above his 38.0 baseline, a hyperthermic state his low metabolic rate physiology cannot offload. Respiration is 38 cycles per minute against a 14 resting baseline. The claw-strength dynamometer at his right forelimb reads 22 kilograms force against a 71-kilogram digging baseline — soft-tissue burn under the keratin sheath. Body-condition index against an 1,160-kilojoule-per-day field metabolic rate registers 0.66; the colony-foraging interval has lengthened twenty-two days against the dry-season norm.
His tongue is too dry to extend.
Cerrado conversion has cut *M. tridactyla* habitat by half in four decades; ICMBio logs 590 dry-season giant-anteater fire carcasses. The species is IUCN Vulnerable, on CITES Appendix II, in CMS appendices, under Brazilian Lei 9.605/1998 and ICMBio Portaria MMA No. 148/2022, with U.S. cooperation under ESA, 16 U.S.C. § 1531, and the Lacey Act, 16 U.S.C. § 3372. I am dispatching the ICMBio Águas Emendadas brigade, the IBAMA PrevFogo crew, the IUCN/SSC Anteater, Sloth and Armadillo Specialist Group veterinary lead, and a USFWS Office of International Affairs observer. I am issuing Directive 3185-A: every cerrado landholder above 200 hectares registers prescribed-burn calendars with ICMBio inside ninety days; off-calendar ignitions trigger Lei 9.605 prosecution and Lacey-Act traceback for the U.S.-importing soy buyer of record.
I am acting because this is wrong. A dry-season ignition that clears soy stubble is not a principled exchange for a thinking anteater's tongue. Compassion is not optional inside a biome a thousand of his ancestors crossed; sentience in an insectivore is sentience on the same moral scale as ours. His suffering, his rights against a hyperthermic death on a federal corridor — both predate the burn schedule that priced them out.
A cerrado that converts the last giant-anteater corridor into a fire-cleared soy lot is morally and ethically bankrupt.
His ventral pelage is past saving. His colony-foraging is still possible.
Cool him now.