Pugmark

A pugmark is an animal track, a footprint, left by a wild animal. The distinctive pugmark of an individual species is useful for identification. "Pug" means foot in Hindi (Sanskrit पद् "pad"; Greek πούς "poús").

Pugmark tracking is a technique used by wildlife conservationists to identify the distribution of species. For some species, such as tigers, pugmark tracking is now considered to be an unreliable method of determining an area's total animal population, leading to the rise in the use of alternative techniques to count populations, such as photographic capture.