GoKawiilTwo white pickup trucks are parked beside a highway that cuts through the Waterberg, a South African municipality three hours from Johannesburg. Passing the trucks on foot, you might hear something that makes you stop: Their cargo is panting. Just visible through the holes at the top of three green wooden crates is fur over rib cages, mottled black, white and gold, rising and falling.
The three sleeping female African wild dogs, sisters, have traveled a long way in the past few weeks, even by the standards of their species, which can cover 30 miles a day and occupy ranges of 1,000 miles. They arrived by plane from Karingani Game Reserve in Mozambique, courtesy of the Endangered Wildlife Trust’s African wild dog range expansion program. The project, which started in 1997, has increased the world’s wild dog population by more than 344 in 29 years. It introduces dogs to wildlife reserves in countries where they haven’t been seen in decades—for instance, Mozambique, where the species disappeared during a civil war that lasted from 1977 to 1992. The Mozambican packs have bred so successfully that the Endangered Wildlife Trust (EWT) is now bringing young dogs to South Africa to form new, genetically diverse packs here. The three sisters have been darted with sedatives, a risky but necessary step in moving them to their new home for the next few weeks—a state-of-the-art enclosure, or boma, the first designed specifically to hold their species—before they’re released, with tracking collars, into the wild.
The sisters represent a not insignificant portion of 6,600 African wild dogs left in the world. According to the World Wildlife Fund, the animals are among the world’s most endangered. Also known as Cape hunting or painted dogs, they resemble large, gangly mongrels with extremities picked from a safari odds-and-ends bin: big, disc-shaped black ears, large paws on skinny legs and fluffy white tails. Each dog’s fur has a clearly unique pattern of black, gold and white splotches—more Abstract Impressionist than the designs that cover snakes, zebras or leopards.
Wild dogs are the most successful hunters in Africa, with a kill rate of 80 percent. Lions, by comparison, kill just 30 percent of what they hunt. The dogs’ superpower is also part of the reason they are so threatened. Owners of many private game reserves would rather kill them than lose expensive game. Subsistence farmers feel the same way about their livestock. A 2021 study published in Ecology and Evolution showed that human causes—including direct killing and diseases from domestic dogs—accounted for 44 percent of all wild dog deaths at study sites in Kenya, Botswana and Zimbabwe over a 15-year period. A lack of continuity between areas where the dogs are welcome means that without intervention, they struggle to find mates.
But there is much to love about the most hated carnivore in Africa. Ask a wild dog enthusiast what they enjoy the most, and they will likely say it is the dogs’ playfulness. Briana Abrahms, who researches wild dogs in Botswana, has seen the pups “bat around balls of elephant dung like a football.” Neil Jordan, a biologist at the University of New South Wales in Australia, discovered that wild dogs are one of the few species on Earth that appear to vote. Before departing on a hunt, the animals hold “rallies”: At dusk, one or two will stand up after resting in the heat and pull their ears back, pretending to stalk prey. They’ll make strange, strangled barks and chittering noises, curling their tongues, playing with one another and urinating.
“And then they kind of snowball socially, so then more get involved, and more get involved. It’s like a big merry-go-round, and they’re all running around crazy,” Jordan says. Typically they’ll do this once, then lie back down, then again, then lie back down. Only when they emit “rapid nasal exhalations,” or sneezes, will they actually depart. (“We still don’t know for sure whether the dogs are using that, or it just happens to be occurring around the same time as they’re signaling their intention to move in another way,” Jordan emphasizes.) Wild dogs also allow their pups to feed first, near-unique behavior among animals, says Jordan. When a member of the pack is injured or sick or heavily pregnant and can’t join a hunt, another dog will regurgitate food for it. Wild dogs look out for one another.
While the sisters doze in the trucks, I take a seat in a hut nearby with Eugene Greyling, one of the EWT field officers transporting the dogs. We’re sitting at the entrance to the Welgevonden Game Reserve, which houses the enclosure that will temporarily contain the dogs. South Africa has four main wild dog populations. The first is in captivity in private zoos. Then there is the population in Kruger National Park, which is the only place in the country with enough dogs to maintain themselves genetically. The third is the free-ranging population, roaming across a patchwork of private and public lands in the Waterberg. Finally, there is a “meta population,” whose members are tracked as they travel through nature reserves such as Welgevonden or the Tswalu Kalahari Reserve, South Africa’s largest privately owned nature reserve. EWT works with the reserves to create new, genetically diverse packs and expand their range.
Did you know? Where do wild dogs fall in their family tree? DNA evidence suggests that African wild dogs split off from wolves, jackals and coyotes around 1.7 million years ago, making this species one of the older branches of the dog family tree. A pack of African wild dogs can bring down prey up to 10 times its own body weight.
Wild dog packs, which consist of between 5 and 20 individuals, have complicated social structures, says Greyling. At the top is the alpha female. She and the alpha male are the only dogs in the pack who breed. In order for populations to grow, dogs must form new packs. A group of sisters will set off in one direction in search of males from another pack, while a group of brothers does the same in a different direction. The EWT carefully monitors dispersal and the packs’ genetics. The lack of continuity between ranges means the animals are likely to get stuck without a mate. Conservationists can’t afford to let sleeping dogs lie.
The three sisters in the truck, for example, had found males back in Mozambique who were too closely related. “We had to think hard about how to manage that, because technically the dogs had done everything right,” says Cole du Plessis, who coordinates the range-expansion project. “If you told people 20 years ago that we were going to be flying wild dogs under sedation to other countries—it’s just quite crazy.”
... continue reading