No two African wild dogs share a coat, and conservationists want to rename them
Every African wild dog wears a unique patchwork of black, brown, yellow and white, often different on each side of its body, and pack mates can pick each other out at up to 100 metres. Conservation groups would rather you called it the painted dog, because the word wild seems to hurt its image.
No other wild dog on the continent grows bigger, and it stands alone in its genus, Lycaon, from the Greek for wolf-like. It was first described in 1820 from a Mozambique specimen and mistakenly filed as a hyena, Hyaena picta, the painted hyena, before being recognised as a canid seven years later. Ancient writers seem to have known it too; a third-century Latin text describes a maned, many-coloured wolf from Ethiopia.
Its body is built for endurance hunting. Wild dogs lack the dewclaw on their forefeet, which lengthens the stride, and their premolars are the biggest relative to body size of any living carnivore except the spotted hyena. The coat is unlike any other canid's, made entirely of stiff bristles with no underfur. Adults weigh 18 to 36 kilograms, and genetic work suggests the lineage split from wolves and dholes about 1.7 million years ago, around the time its hoofed prey diversified.
Packs hunt mostly at dawn and dusk, wearing prey down through stamina and teamwork rather than speed alone. Their social glue is sharing: like other canids they bring up food for their pups, but they also regurgitate meals for other adults, and the young get first access to a kill. Lions kill wild dogs when they can, and spotted hyenas regularly steal their catches.
The outlook is grim. Around 6,600 adults survive in 39 separate subpopulations, and the largest probably holds fewer than 250 animals, so the species has been listed as endangered since 1990. Fragmented habitat, persecution by people and disease outbreaks all take a toll. It prefers open savanna but turns up in surprising places, including a pack reported on the summit of Kilimanjaro.
Source: African wild dog
