He Was Searching For Intersexual Pigs And Ended Up Finding The World's Rarest Dog

Twenty years after beginning his quest to find what’s been called the world’s rarest canine species, James “Mac” McIntyre was vindicated. There on his camera screen were the images he’d been waiting years for. The New Guinea highland wild dog — an animal once feared extinct — was alive and well, his pictures showed. “I squealed like a girl,” the 62-year-old said earlier this month, speaking from his Florida home. “It was emotionally such a tremendous moment. It was justification for all the work I’ve done.” How McIntyre ended up finding the New Guinea highland wild dog, an animal whose existence had not been verified in almost 30 years, is a story as complex as McIntyre’s own. Trained as a zoologist, McIntyre has worked as a veterinary technician on a cattle ranch, zookeeper at the Bronx Zoo, high school biology teacher, logger and carpenter. But throughout his varied careers, scientific research and exploration have remained personal passions. “On evenings and weekends, and summers too when I was a teacher, I’d conduct independent field research, on my own and on my own dime,” McIntyre said. It was this spirit of enquiry that first led him to the South Pacific. But in the beginning, it wasn’t rare wild dogs that lured him there. It was pigs ― specifically intersexual ones. ‘Pig half-man half-woman’ Vanuatu, an archipelago west of Fiji, has the unique distincti...
Source: Science - The Huffington Post - Category: Science Source Type: news