On Sunday, December 29th, I was driving through Kruger Park and decided to take a dirt road along Sabie River, hoping it might have limited traffic. Of course, within 4 minutes, a car coming from the opposite direction was heading my way. However, instead of just driving by, they made it a point to flag me down and the driver alerted me that there were wild dogs and something about a rat. Okay, that sounded interesting.
I knew there were wild dogs in Africa — and also some idea that they were not dogs (i.e. related, but not in the genus Canis).
After driving 30 minutes and seeing various herds of impala, I figured I had missed this opportunity. Oh well. I haven’t been disappointed by any of these detours yet.
After another 15 minutes, I turned off the road into a place where I could spot some cars. And there were the dogs!
The African wild dog, which is actually in named Lycaon pictus is in the Canidae,which includes domestic dogs, wolves, coyotes, foxes, jackals, dingoes, and many other extant and extinct dog-like mammals and where a fair amount of diversification occurred on Africa since it had already split from Gondwana.
And now that I had found them I didn’t really know what to do with a car that had decided to park 5 feet from the animals, which seemed a bit intrusive to the animals and blocking my view! Of course, I am not sure was a non-intrusive distance might be — my being within 20 meters was also intrusive.
Nevertheless, after 20 min, the car left and I had a better view and replaced my lens to get a bit closer.
It turns the animal is endangered and of the over 500,000,000 that were on the continent 100 years ago, there are only 6,600 adults left (1,400 are reproductive — not sure why there such discrepancy — maybe reproductive females) and in less than 40 populations.
As a pack hunters and social, they are very good effective predators. In fact, I found on citations that claimed hat they are 80% efficient. Apparently, that is the highest among terrestrial predators.
Unfortunately, with such hunting efficiencies, live stock holders are not enthusiastic about these guys running free. I suspect this is the reason why there populations have declined so precipitously.
