Mélogale indien

Large-toothed Ferret Badger's population size and trend is not well known, in large part because of the small number of recent records across its range that are reliably identified to species (i.e. the externally very similar Small-toothed Ferret Badger has been justifiably and explicitly excluded). Looking at patterns of overall ferret badger occurrence across this species's specimen-validated range (see 'Habitats and ecology'), it is impossible to assess directly the present population status of this species in areas where Small-toothed Ferret Badger is also known to occur, such as Yunnan province (China), Viet Nam and North-east India. However, there seem presently to be no known records of Small-toothed Ferret Badger from the large area of mainland South-east Asia experiencing a harsh dry season and with forest largely or wholly deciduous. This area includes most of the lowlands and lower hills of each of Cambodia, Lao PDR, Thailand, Myanmar and Bangladesh. In these countries, Small-toothed Ferret Badger is either unrecorded or known only from evergreen habitats (both forest and degraded areas), mostly in the highlands. (This assessment is not applicable throughout Small-toothed Ferret Badger's range; further north [and well north of any Large-toothed Ferret Badger record], in China, where Small-toothed Ferret Badger occurs in deciduous forest, the climate differs greatly from that in monsoonal South-east Asia, having for instance a much colder dry season.) Assuming that all the mainland South-east Asian records of ferret badgers in lowlands with harsh dry season to relate to Large-toothed Ferret Badger, this latter species clearly remains widespread but is typically recorded only rather rarely (Than Zaw et al. 2008, Robichaud 2010, Gray et al. 2014a, Chutipong et al. 2014). While this might indicate genuine rarity, a number of specimen-validated records come from highly degraded areas of South-east Asia (Van Peenen et al. 1971, Schank et al. 2009, Chutipong et al. 2014) or adjacent north-east India (Kakati et al. 2014), raising the possibility that it might be associated with edge and degraded areas (consistent with the general assessment of habitat use by Lekagul and McNeely (1977), and is simply much overlooked by the focus of most wildlife survey in South-east Asia on little-degraded forest. General mammal hunting is generally very heavy in Lao PDR and Viet Nam and uses mostly unselective techniques: thus, Large-toothed Ferret Badger populations in these countries might well be depleted, in both degraded and forest areas (see Duckworth et al. 2010, Coudrat et al. 2014). Hunting levels are typically much lower in Cambodia, Thailand and Myanmar (Than Zaw et al. 2008, Gray et al. 2014a, Chutipong et al. 2014). Too little information is available from India and China (specifically, the precise locations of multiple records of both species relative to patterns of dry-season harshness and of relevant survey effort) to speculate on Large-toothed Ferret Badger population status in these countries.