How Do African Wild Dogs Hunt? Teamwork and Success Rates

Step by step: a typical wild dog hunt

A hunt usually begins with a lively rally. The pack wakes, greets each other with twittering calls, licking and play, and then decides whether to set off. Research in Botswana showed that the dogs “vote” with sneezes: the more sneezes, the more likely the pack is to leave.

The dogs then trot through the bush, often in a loose line, until they spot a herd. They approach quietly and as close as they can. When the herd runs, the chase begins. One or a few dogs lead at high speed while others follow, and lead positions change as dogs tire. Some dogs cut corners when prey runs in a curve, so the animal loses ground each time it turns.

A large antelope is grabbed by the legs, flanks or rump until it stops running. Smaller prey is simply pulled down. Medium-sized prey is usually dead within a few minutes, and larger animals such as adult wildebeest can take much longer.

What do African wild dogs hunt?

The African wild dog is a specialist hunter of antelope. The main prey changes from place to place:

Most prey weighs about 15–200 kg (33–441 lb). Wild dogs often pick young, old or weak animals, which are easier to catch. Some packs take bigger animals, and certain Serengeti packs regularly killed adult plains zebras. Impala are the staple in many southern African parks.

Why chasing in a team works

Wild dogs are not the fastest African predators: a cheetah’s sprint is much quicker. Their advantage is stamina. Long legs, a light build and the loss of the dewclaw on the front feet make them efficient long-distance runners. Prey that outruns a lion in the first hundred meters may still be caught by wild dogs several kilometers later.

Teamwork adds to this. Several dogs chasing means the prey cannot rest, and if it doubles back it often runs into another dog. Because the whole pack eats, even dogs that never touch the prey gain from a kill. A 2016 study that fitted GPS and motion collars to a wild dog pack in northern Botswana found that many chases were short and loosely coordinated, but sharing the meat still made hunting very worthwhile for every dog.

How successful are African wild dogs?

African wild dogs are often called the most successful hunters in Africa, and many field studies do show that well over half of pack hunts end in a kill, sometimes much more. But the figure depends heavily on how a “hunt” is defined.

• Counting whole pack hunts, success is often high, with many studies reporting more than 60%.
• Counting every individual chase by every dog, success is lower. The Botswana collar study found that only about 15.5% of individual chases ended in a kill.
• A review that combined many studies of different prey found an average of about 31%.

So wild dogs are very effective, but the famous figure of “80–90% success” applies only to some packs, prey and ways of counting. For comparison, lions typically succeed in roughly a quarter to a third of their hunts, as described in What do lions eat?.

Sharing the kill

Wild dogs eat fast, because spotted hyenas and lions often try to steal their kills. A pack can finish a gazelle in about 15 minutes. Each dog eats roughly 1.2–5.9 kg (2.6–13 lb) of meat a day, and a big pack may kill more than once a day.

Unusually among predators, there is little fighting over food. When the pack has a litter, pups that are old enough to eat solid food get first access to the carcass, even before the dominant pair. Adults also carry meat back in their stomachs and regurgitate it for the pups, for the mother guarding the den and for pack members that are sick or injured.

Losing kills to hyenas and lions

Wild dogs spend a lot of energy running down prey, so every stolen kill hurts. Spotted hyenas often follow packs and try to take food, and lions kill wild dogs when they can. A large pack can drive off a few hyenas, but small packs may lose much of what they catch. This is one reason wild dog numbers are usually low where lions and hyenas are abundant, and why pack size matters so much to their survival.