Hi

There are only 500 wild dogs left in the world – down from 3000 a few years ago when distemper struck and reduced the population to its current level. From previously an endangered species it is now a very, very endangered species with a slender chance of survival due to the diminution of their gene pool.

Madikwe Game reserve has two packs of wild dogs one of four dogs and the other of twelve. Last year it was one pack of 16. Last year I followed the 16 dog pack for two hours watching them hunt. They never stop running. This year I was lucky to find the pack of 4 dogs and followed them four about an hour and saw one attempted kill of an impala. Wild dogs have an 85% success rate when it comes to killing against 40% for lions. A pack of 16 would need to kill twice a day because they are so active.

One trick that the larger pack has is to get the prey running really fast and to guide it towards the perimeter fence which it cannot see. The prey runs at top speed into the fence and breaks its neck ready to be eaten by the dogs.

These dogs are seen as vermin by local farmers. A second Madikwe pack of 16 was shot by a farmer who said that they were endangering his livestock (they had yet to kill anything). A call to the reserve would have meant the dogs would have been returned to a part of the reserve remote from the farmer’s land. Instead the farmer chose to shoot all 16 dogs and lay them out on his lawn for the park rangers to collect. How sick are some people! However under South African farmers have the right to shoot anything that might endanger their livestock. One exception is in Kwazulu-natal where farmers have to show a leopard has killed three times before shooting it. Leopard conservationist in that state tag all the leopards they can so they can show whether or not the leopard was at the place stated by the farmer and farmers are now cooperating with the conservationists to check they have identified the right leopard before acting.

Back to the wild dogs – they are beautiful animals as the pictures show.