Are African Wild Dogs Endangered? Numbers and Threats

How many African wild dogs are left?

The African wild dog is hard to count because packs roam enormous areas, often hundreds of square kilometers, and move dens every year. The IUCN figures are therefore careful estimates built from many regional surveys.

The key numbers from the 2020 assessment are:

The gap between 6,600 adults and 1,400 breeders exists because, in most packs, only the dominant pair produces pups. A pack of ten adults may contain just one breeding female. That is why the Red List focuses on mature, breeding animals: they are the ones that keep the population going.

Why are African wild dogs endangered?

Painted wolves once lived across most of sub-Saharan Africa. They have now vanished from the large majority of that range. Several threats work together.

Habitat loss and fragmentation. Wild dogs need more space than almost any other African carnivore. As farms, settlements, fences and roads spread, their habitat breaks into islands too small to hold healthy packs. Even large national parks may be too small, because packs regularly wander out of them.

Conflict with people. Outside protected areas, wild dogs sometimes kill sheep, goats or young cattle, and farmers have shot and poisoned them for this. In the past they were officially treated as vermin in several countries. Today they are protected in most range states, but killing in retaliation still happens.

Snares and roads. Wire snares set to catch antelopes for bushmeat also trap and kill wild dogs. Because packs travel long distances, often along roads, they are hit by vehicles too.

Disease from domestic dogs. Rabies and canine distemper, carried by village dogs, can wipe out entire packs. Wild dogs live in close contact, groom and lick each other and share regurgitated food, so a virus spreads quickly. The famous wild dog population of the Serengeti and Maasai Mara collapsed around 1990–1991, and disease is thought to have played a major part.

Competition with lions and hyenas. Lions kill wild dogs, and spotted hyenas steal their kills. This is natural, but in small, fenced reserves with many lions, wild dogs struggle to survive.

Why small populations are so fragile

African wild dogs have a social system that makes small populations especially vulnerable. Packs depend on new members arriving from other packs: young females leave home and join packs where they are not related to the males. When subpopulations are isolated, dispersing dogs cannot find unrelated mates, so new packs fail to form.

Pack size matters as well. A large pack hunts more efficiently, defends kills against hyenas better and has more adults to feed the pups. If a pack shrinks to two or three adults, it often cannot raise a litter. This means that once numbers drop, they can keep dropping even when the original cause is removed.

Where do African wild dogs still live?

The largest remaining populations are in southern and eastern Africa. Important strongholds include:

• Southern Tanzania, especially the Nyerere (formerly Selous) and Ruaha landscapes, long considered one of the largest populations.
• Northern Botswana, including the Okavango Delta and surrounding wildlife areas.
• Zimbabwe, notably Hwange and Mana Pools National Parks.
• Zambia, including the Luangwa Valley and Kafue.
• South Africa, with Kruger National Park holding several hundred dogs, plus small reserves managed as one connected population.
• Mozambique, in large wild areas such as Niassa.

Elsewhere wild dogs survive in smaller numbers, for example in northern Kenya. In West Africa, the only population considered potentially viable is in Senegal’s Niokolo-Koba National Park, and the species has disappeared from most of Central and North Africa.

What is being done to save them?

Conservation work focuses on giving packs room and keeping them alive outside parks. Common measures include:

• Protecting large, connected landscapes, including wildlife corridors between parks and across national borders.
• Working with livestock farmers on better herding and night-time enclosures, which reduce losses and retaliation.
• Removing snares through anti-poaching patrols.
• Vaccinating domestic dogs near wild dog areas against rabies and distemper.
• In South Africa, moving dogs between fenced reserves so the small, separate populations work as one larger population.
• Supporting tourism that values wild dogs, which gives local communities a reason to protect them.

These efforts have stabilized wild dogs in some places, but across Africa as a whole the species is still declining. With so few breeding animals, the painted wolf is one of the continent’s most threatened large carnivores, more threatened on the Red List than the lion, which is classed as Vulnerable. For more on how lion numbers have changed, see Are lions endangered?.