A troubled post about the fate of Hydrochaeris hydrochaeris in Belo Horizonte

I have noticed during the past several weeks that the Lagoa da Pampulha is not looking so hot. My suspicion is that this is a direct result of recent rains that carry all kinds of wastewater and solid waste into the lake. It smells terrible and looks even worse--I don't like to bother carrying a camera around on most walks in the city, and the pictures would make you unhappy.

On Sunday I went out for a walk. On the way back towards my house, I notice a large brown animal on the trash-strewn shore of the lake. I knew immediately what it was, given my near transformation into one during my several months researching and caring for them in Ecuador: a capybara. I stopped and took out my headphones. I stood perfectly still for several minutes, staring intently at the body to see if there was any movement from breathing--but there wasn't. I must have looked upset; a man stopped next to me and said "it's a capybara!" "Yes," I said, "it is a capybara." "Is it dead or alive?" He asked. "Dead, I think," I said. He was convinced that it must have escaped from the nearby zoo. "they don't live here!" He said. I started to try and tell him that they might, actually, live in the lake...and then decided it wasn't worth it. He would have no reason to believe my word on that one, and probably would not have believed me if I told him I had spent a whole semester researching the animal.

The very sad part of this is, that the capybara was probably, up until it's demise, living happily in the Lagoa da Pampulha until it ate something toxic or suffocated in the incredible stinking matt of algae covering the grassland on the edge of the lake. The body was still there yesterday and I am too angry and sad to write anything else about it. Here is a happy picture of some very sweet domesticated capybara, for old times' sake: