Tibetan Sand Fox

The broad muzzle and narrow-set eyes give the animal a flat, oddly formal expression, but the shape is structural — a wide skull anchoring the bite of a rodent specialist. Plateau pikas make up the bulk of the diet, and sand foxes will follow brown bears digging out pika burrows, taking what escapes the excavation.

For decades Chinese and Tibetan rangeland policy treated the pika as a pest and poisoned it across vast areas to protect grazing, on the reasoning that it caused degradation. The current reading is closer to the reverse: pikas colonise ground already degraded by overgrazing, and their burrows aerate soil and shelter other species. Where the campaigns succeeded, the fox that depends on them thinned out with them.