What are wild dogs enemies? Surprising Answer

Predators of the African Wild Dog

This African dog is about the same size as most large domesticated dogs.

Due to their size and the daily threats human civilization imposes on them, these dogs have some serious threats to look out for.

Since the wild dog roams in the open African savanna areas, expanding human civilization, angry farmers and domestic animal diseases are some of their biggest threats.

Though it may seem more likely for these dogs to be most affected by protective farmers with shotguns, domestic dog disease is actually a much more serious threat.

The combination of threats caused by human civilization encroachment had led to this wild animal’s placement on the endangered species list. To this day, there are only 5,000 African wild dogs left in the world and that number is extremely fragile as is.

While society expansion is the most threatening issue facing these dogs, they also have some natural predators they need to avoid as well.

Here are the top three predators of the African wild dog.

Lions are considerably larger and heavier than the African dogs. While the dogs weigh around 40 to 70 pounds, lions can grow up to over 400 pounds, making African dogs look like a nice afternoon snack to the lion.

Even though the dogs travel and live in packs and are much stronger and powerful when together, lions also live in groups and hunt in small packs, giving the dogs almost zero chance for survival.

Lions will kill as many wild dogs as they can, usually dispatching the pups while they’re at it. This makes these two creatures notorious enemies.

However, what’s interesting is that lions don’t actually kill dogs to eat them. Which is why it’s hard to understand why they attack them in the first place. Perhaps it’s just a classic case of cat vs. dog or something to do with evolution.

The rate of success African dogs have during their hunts is much higher than lions’ success rate. Because of this, lions tend to steal a wild dog pack’s fresh kill as opposed to hunting something of their own.

In the wild, lions are dog’s main threat. In an area with a high population of lions, there tends to be a low population of wild dogs.

Now it may be a bit easier to see where the saying, “fighting like cats and dogs” originally comes from.

African dogs are also wary of the spotted hyena.

This mammal, which looks fairly similar to the wild dog in some ways, is a skilled hunter, however, tends to also scavenge fresh kill from other creatures such as the African dogs and lions.

The spotted hyena is the largest type of hyena, out of the three existing species.

National Geographic states that this type of hyena can range in size, anywhere between 110 to 190 pounds, which makes them over twice as large as the African dog.

These hyenas have extremely strong jaws and live in clans that tend to outnumber the dog packs, making them able to kill the dogs if they choose to steal and eat their food.

However, that being said, very few hyenas will actually outwardly attack adult African dogs, unless they need to get to their fresh kill.

While we briefly touched on human’s influence on wild dog numbers, at this point, it only makes sense to include them as one of these creature’s main predators.

Farmers tend to look at the wild dogs as vermin since they are attracted to the farmer’s livestock. Farmers will go to the extent of shooting these creatures with the intention to kill and even tracking down their homes to poison them.

However, not all human harm is intentional.

Some poachers’ snares that have been emplaced for other animals have been known to accidentally kill these creatures. And, as we mentioned earlier, the encroachment of civilization on these animals’ habitats also contributes significantly to their demise.

However, the main cause of this significant population decline is rabies, which is usually passed on by domestic animals. The reason why this is such a significant issue is that of these animal’s intuitively social nature. When one dog contacts the disease, the pack quickly becomes infected as well, wiping the entire family out in one swoop.

As you can see, these dogs have very few natural enemies. Humans are definitely the biggest threat to these incredible animal’s survival. Although there was no evidence to prove it, a long time ago they were considered pests and would be attacked by farmers and expanding civilization members out of fear of personal or property safety.

However, despite this fear, there has been no recorded incident of wild dogs attacking humans, only livestock when they become desperate enough.

The entire pack is involved in the welfare of the pups.

Both males and females babysit the young and provide food for them. The hunting members of the pack return to the den where they regurgitate meat for the nursing female and pups. Although the litters are large, very few pups survive. Sometimes the dens are flooded, or the pups die from exposure or disease. When pack numbers are reduced, hunting is not as efficient, and adults may not bring back sufficient food for the pups. In some cases, more pups survive in packs where there are more helpers.

What is an African wild dog?

The wild dog — also sometimes called the hunting dog or African painted dog — has a colorful, patchy coat; large bat-like ears; and a bushy tail with a white tip that may serve as a flag to keep the pack in contact while hunting. No two wild dogs are marked exactly the same, making it easy to identify individuals. Conservation Status Endangered Scientific name

18 to 36 kilograms (40 to 79 pounds) Size

About 1 meter in length (30 to 43 inches) Life span

Dense forest to open plains Diet

Humans and occasionally lions Approximately 6,600 remain in the wild Endangered for over 20 years Pack range can cover 1,448 kilometers

Why Wild Dogs and Hyena are always the best enemies of Leopard – What did Leopard do to escape?

A new study shows that bramble and brush help the canines avoid attacks by the big cats, and may offer clues about where to reintroduce the dogs

Mottled black-and-brown African wild dogs often prance and squeak through grasslands, chattering like birds. Weighing around 50 pounds, these canines may look cute with their pink tongues protruding from beneath their black noses, but tight-knit families and cooperative hunting techniques put wild dogs among Sub-Saharan Africa’s top predators. Packs can easily take down an impala or a wildebeest. But despite their prowess, there’s one animal wild dogs won’t take on: lions.

Even a small 300-pound female lion can easily kill a dog. Lions and wild dogs share some of the same prey species, like impala, so lions view dogs as threats to their food supply, and try to kill any dogs they can catch. For that reason, conservationists have long focused on reintroducing wild dogs—an endangered species—to areas where lions are scarce.

Andrew Davies had a feeling this didn’t need to be the case. Now an organismic and evolutionary biologist at Harvard University, Davies grew up in South Africa near Hluhluwe-iMfolozi Park—a 370-square-mile nature reserve that supports a healthy wild dog population despite also being home to many lions. “Lions and wild dogs have coevolved,” he says, adding that it makes sense that wild dogs have figured out ways to survive with lions around. Hluhluwe-iMfolozi is known for its highly variable landscape, with rolling hills, grassland, wide rivers and large floodplains. Davies had a hunch that all these features helped dogs survive in the presence of lions.

Through an international collaboration, he and other scientists combined a high-resolution map of the park with data from tracking collars on dogs and lions. They found that wild dogs are experts at hiding, and that taking cover in scrub brush, holes and gullies helped them circumvent lions and escape death. This finding, published recently in Ecology, shows that wild dog conservation projects can succeed in areas with lions, if these areas have highly variable landscapes. Davies hopes this information will inform long-term conservation strategies that will hopefully rescue dogs from the threat of extinction.

“There’s this prescription that’s emerging for how you build a diverse park setting that will hold a diverse number of animals that can coexist with very lightweight management,” says Greg Asner, the director of Arizona State University’s Center for Global Discovery and Conservation, who was also involved in the study. His prescription involves building parks on land with many types of interconnected habitats so that dogs can easily access a variety of hiding places. “The habitat in that land that you’re protecting really matters,” he says. “Just as much as how much land you’re putting in for protection.”

British colonialists established Hluhluwe-iMfolozi Park in 1895. Hunters had driven popular game animals, like the white rhinoceros, to the brink of extinction. Even decades before the environmental movement, colonialists sensed that they should set aside space to preserve the region’s wildlife. Wild dogs—which kill livestock—were viewed as vermin, and were not on the list of animals to be conserved. By 1901, colonial officials had placed a bounty of one pound on the head of every wild dog. Farmers and hunters nearly eliminated them from Hluhluwe-iMfolozi and the rest of the region by the 1930s.

In 1980, a governmental wildlife conservation agency that’s now called Ezemvelo KZN Wildlife reintroduced wild dogs to Hluhluwe-iMfolozi. Scientists had come to appreciate these canines’ complex social structures and the role they play in balancing ecosystems. By eating impala, for example, wild dogs limit how much vegetation these grazers consume and allow plants to flourish. But despite conservation efforts, African wild dogs now occupy less than seven percent of their historic terrain. Scientists want to understand the conditions wild dogs need to thrive so that they can again offer ecological benefits throughout Africa.

To save wild dogs, conservationists need to learn how they interact with other predators. For their study, Davies and colleagues sought to understand the relationship between dogs and lions. To do so, the researchers combined LiDAR-generated maps with signals from radio collars placed on the different predators. Invented over 50 years ago and often deployed from an airplane, LiDAR bounces lasers off the surface of the Earth to glean information about the structure of the land below. The scientists paired their LiDAR maps with tracking data to create representations of what each animal saw as it moved through its surroundings. The researchers then assigned dogs numerous numerical scores that described characteristics like their proximity to lions and the ruggedness of the terrain they chose to move through.

Davies and his colleagues put these scores in ecological models and produced results that supported their hypothesis that dogs hide to avoid lions. Although Davies suspected the result, he was still surprised to see how often dogs stuck to moving through scrubby thickets. Even when the closest lions were roughly a mile away, the dogs still avoided being out in the open.

Scott Creel, a conservation biologist and ecologist at Montana State University who was not involved in this research, says he’s not surprised by these new findings because ecologists have long known that dogs go to great lengths to avoid lions, but that this study is a great step toward understanding how this avoidance happens. “This new study is a great contribution,” he writes in an email.

“It definitely makes sense,” says Creel’s graduate student Ben Goodheart, who added that a 2014 study in PLOS ONE found that wild dogs tend to build dens in rugged areas, presumably also to avoid lions.

“This paper, what it does that’s different from others is that it really looks at the nuance of how that avoidance happens,” says Harriet Davies-Mostert, the head of conservation at South Africa’s Endangered Wildlife Trust, who is no relation to Andrew Davies. Since 2006, Asner and colleagues have been perfecting the combination of LiDAR and animal trackers. In this study, they analyzed the landscape with much higher resolution than would have been possible a decade ago. They also measured dog and lion movement more frequently than many previous publications. “As technology unfolds, you can make use of much more fine scale information to really tease apart what the mechanisms of spatial ecology are,” Davies-Mostert says.

Davies-Mostert joined the wild dog research community as a PhD student in the early 2000s and has long collaborated with the study’s authors, although she was not involved in the recent publication. She thinks that understanding the importance that rugged terrain holds for wild dogs may motivate ecologists to design new parks to include variable habitats with many hiding places. At the same time, she thinks current reintroduction efforts, which do not necessarily emphasize varied terrain, are still worth continuing. “Very rarely is conservation a perfect art,” Davies-Mostert says. She thinks that introducing dogs to landscapes that have other advantages, like ample prey, still have the potential to be successful.

And success with wild dog reintroduction positions parks to successfully conserve other animals. Davies-Mostert says that in addition to helping balance ecosystems, wild dogs indicate how healthy ecosystems are as a whole. Each pack needs around 200 square miles of range to thrive, so conserving dogs pushes park managers to establish large regions of undisturbed wilderness. In that wilderness, everything from plants up to top carnivores can thrive, and complex ecosystems can develop.

“If you’re successful in conserving an area that can contain wild dogs and secure them,” Davies-Mostert says, “the knock-on effects of that for many other species is really significant.”

The original photographs and extracts within this article are from Africa’s Wild Dogs: A Survival Story, by Jocelin Kagan. The book is published by Merlin Unwin Books, and is available from neighborhood bookstores and via online booksellers. Recommended Videos