The Dog Family: African and Asian Wild Dogs

African wild dog

So far, my survey of the dog family has looked at the "wolf-like" dogs, rather than the foxes and their kin. Most of these are either wolves, coyotes, or jackals, but there are two species that stand slightly apart, although modern genetic analysis has shown that they are, indeed, more closely related to wolves than they are to foxes.

The more distinctive, and probably the better known, of the two species (Lycaon pictus) has a wide number of different names. I'm going to call it the African wild dog here, but it is also known as the "African hunting dog", the "painted dog", or by some combination of these terms. (In French, Spanish, and Italian, it's simply the "lycaon", or some spelling variant thereof. The word commemorates a character from Greek mythology, who Zeus turns into a wolf).

Whatever it's called, the African wild dog is a distinctive animal. The large rounded ears and the slender, athletic body are noticeable enough in themselves, but it's the coat pattern that really makes it hard to mistake for anything else. The exact pattern varies tremendously - every animal is unique, and they can readily be distinguished one from another. Once found throughout almost the whole of sub-Saharan Africa, animals from the north tend to be dark with white and yellow patches, while those from further south are generally pale, with a few black patches. It was once thought that these might represent different subspecies, but they seem to blend into one another gradually as you cross the continent, which would rule that out. African wild dogs are adapted for running, and shedding the heat that results from doing so. They also, for less clear reasons, have no dewclaws on their front feet, as all other dogs do.

Spanish Painted Dogs (and What They Can Tell Us)

Members of the dog family can be broadly divided into two groups. One goup are the vulpines, including such familiar animals as the red fox and its Arctic relative. The other are the true canines, a rather more diverse group found wild on every continent bar Antarctica. While species in the first group are all basically fox-like, those in the latter are not necessarily "wolf-like". Indeed, the second group includes the zorros, or South American foxes, which descend from a more wolf-like animal that nipped south when the two American continents collided.

Still, the second group does include animals that are more obviously wolf-like, such as the wolves themselves, along with coyotes, jackals, dingos, and so on. But there are also a number of species that are more distinctive, and while (in most cases) clearly dogs of some kind, aren't that much like our normal ideas of either wolves or foxes.

Surviving on the Edge

The spread of humanity across the globe has been bad news for a number of animal species. Species have always gone extinct, as the climate or other circumstances change, but the pace of extinction, and the number of species that are currently teetering on the brink has greatly increased over the last few thousand years. In many cases, humans are the direct cause of the problem: we kill animals for food, for sport, for make-believe medicines, to protect our livestock or crops, and so on.

But just as often the effects are indirect, as natural habitats are broken up into smaller isolated pockets or destroyed altogether. A few species have adapted well to human environments, and are rarely, if ever, found far from our settlements - the house mouse and the pigeon are both examples, before we even begin to look at pets or livestock. But most have not fared so well, and the question of how our destruction of the habitat affects animals is obviously an important one in conservation.