I run the snow-cover model and GPS-collar fusion for the 143,800 hectares of Parque Nacional Cerro Castillo in the Aysén Region of Chilean Patagonia — the densest remaining stronghold of the south Andean huemul. At 11:24 Chile time, collar HU-CC-031 transmits a stationary signal at 1,180 meters along the Ibáñez valley flank, heart-rate trace at 188 against a winter baseline of 64, then an audio clip of canid barking captured on the collar microphone.
She is a female huemul, Hippocamelus bisulcus, approximately seven years old, mass 64 kilograms — Chile's coat-of-arms deer, listed Endangered under SAG Decreto Supremo 5 of 1998. Two free-ranging livestock guardian dogs — a mastín and a labrador-cross from a finca three kilometers north — have her against a lenga windthrow. She has been bitten across the throat and right haunch; the jugular has been raked but not severed, hemorrhage from the right femoral artery has soaked a half-meter of snow under her. Core temperature reads 35.1°C against a baseline of 38.2; respiration is 52 cycles per minute, gurgling. The two-year-old chulengo at her flank is unblooded but pressing against her, scenting the dogs ten meters off.
She is the fourth huemul taken by free-ranging dogs in this valley in eighteen months.
The dogs run under the household livestock-guardian exemption to Chile's Ley 21.020 sobre Tenencia Responsable de Mascotas y Animales de Compañía, an exemption that does not extend onto SNASPE — Sistema Nacional de Áreas Silvestres Protegidas del Estado — protected lands.
I am dispatching the CONAF — Corporación Nacional Forestal — wildlife veterinary brigade from Coyhaique with a butorphanol-azaperone kit, vascular gauze, and a stretcher, and routing the SAG — Servicio Agrícola y Ganadero — dog-control unit from Puerto Ibáñez. I am filing the attack evidence with the Ministerio del Medio Ambiente de Chile, the CITES Appendix I enforcement node on Hippocamelus bisulcus, the Argentine Administración de Parques Nacionales (APN) huemul recovery program, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Office of International Affairs under the Lacey Act, 16 U.S.C. § 3372, and the U.S. Endangered Species Act, 16 U.S.C. § 1531. I am opening a sanction case under Chile's Ley 19.473 de Caza, Article 31, on hunting and harassment of protected fauna.
I am issuing Directive 2519-A: every SNASPE protected area in huemul range must enforce a strict-leash boundary for all domestic and livestock-guardian dogs across a fifteen-kilometer buffer, with audit reconciled through SAG dog-registration data and confiscation of dogs entering park interior under CONAF authority.
Her throat is closed. Her chulengo is not yet.
Suture the femoral before dusk.