Historically, dogs have played a prominent role in subsistence hunting. In the contemporary Mayab, the group hunting or batida provides multiple sociocultural benefits for those who practice it, in addition to wild meat. Here, we analyze the social perception of dogs used in batida as part of the cosmovision of Maya peasant-hunters in a rural community of Campeche, Mexico. We conducted semistructured interviews with 36 local batida hunters who owned a total of 51 dogs. Batida dogs provide different benefits (meat and social prestige for Maya peasant-hunters) depending on their roles as maestros (leader dogs) or secretarios (support dogs) and the type of prey captured. Hunting dogs go beyond their utilitarian value as a hunting technology and play an important role in the sociocultural dynamic of the batida, one of the main wildlife practices mediating the relationships between peasant communities and their natural surroundings in the Yucatan Peninsula.

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