Are African Wild Dogs Really Dogs? The Painted Wolf Family

Where African wild dogs fit in the dog family

The dog family, Canidae, includes about three dozen living species: wolves, coyotes, jackals, foxes, the dhole, the bush dog, the maned wolf and others. The African wild dog belongs to the group of wolf-like canids, alongside the genus Canis, which contains the gray wolf, the coyote, jackals and the domestic dog.

Within that group, the African wild dog has its own genus, Lycaon, and it is the only living species in it. Genetic studies suggest its lineage separated from those of Canis and the Asian dhole well over a million years ago. Its genome also carries traces of ancient interbreeding with the dhole’s ancestors, even though the two species live on different continents today.

So the honest answer is: yes, a dog in the broad sense of the family, but no, not a dog in the everyday sense of Canis familiaris, the domestic dog.

How African wild dogs differ from domestic dogs and wolves

Painted wolves look dog-like at first glance, but a closer look shows several clear differences.

Toes. Domestic dogs and wolves have a small fifth toe, the dewclaw, on the inside of each front leg. African wild dogs lack it, leaving four toes on every foot. This is thought to help with long, fast running.

Teeth. Their cheek teeth are built almost entirely for slicing meat. The same blade-like design evolved separately in two other meat-specialist canids, the dhole and South America’s bush dog. Wolves and dogs keep a broader tooth surface that can also crush.

Coat. No other canid has such a patchy, multicolored coat, and no two painted wolves look the same.

A long, separate history

Fossils of the painted wolf’s lineage are scarce, which makes its history hard to trace. An extinct relative, Lycaon sekowei, lived in South Africa around two million years ago and already had the special premolar cusps found only in Lycaon today, although it still had the fifth front toe. The oldest known fossil of the modern species, about 200,000 years old, comes from a cave in Israel, showing that it once ranged beyond Africa. Domestic dogs, by comparison, were tamed from wolves only within roughly the last 15,000 to 40,000 years.

Behavior that sets them apart

Wolves and African wild dogs both live in packs, but their social lives differ. In a wolf pack, young of both sexes usually leave home to find mates. In a wild dog pack, males tend to stay, while young females leave to join other packs.

Wild dogs also share food more freely than wolves. Adults regurgitate meat for pups and for sick or injured adults, and pups eat first at kills. Pack members rarely fight over food. Wolves, by contrast, often feed in a looser order, with the breeding pair tending to eat first.

Communication differs too. Wolves are famous for their howls, explained in Why do wolves howl?. Wild dogs have a softer vocabulary of twitters, whines and “hoo” contact calls, and they use sneezes when deciding whether to set off on a hunt.

Can African wild dogs breed with dogs or wolves?

No hybrids between African wild dogs and domestic dogs or wolves have ever been confirmed. Wolves, coyotes, jackals and domestic dogs, all in the genus Canis, can interbreed with each other, and they share the same chromosome number as the African wild dog, 78. But the Lycaon lineage has been separate for a very long time, and differences in genes, anatomy and behavior make a cross extremely unlikely.

This matters for conservation. The domestic dog is a threat to painted wolves not through interbreeding but through disease: rabies and canine distemper can pass from village dogs to wild dogs and kill whole packs.

Other names and common mix-ups

The African wild dog has many names: African hunting dog, Cape hunting dog, painted dog, painted wolf and painted lycaon. Some conservation groups prefer “painted dog” or “painted wolf” because “wild dog” is easily confused with feral domestic dogs or with Australia’s dingo, which belongs to the genus Canis.

Another common mix-up is with hyenas. Hyenas look somewhat dog-like and share the same savannas, but they are not canids at all. They belong to their own family, which is more closely related to cats and mongooses, as explained in Are hyenas dogs or cats?.