African Wild Dogs (Part 3)
On the Hunt, and The Twinge of Social Conscience
by Richard Conniff
In truth, what impresses McNutt about the dogs isn't their viciousness, but how gentle and considerate they are with one another. One day we find a pack lying near a great, pyramidal termite mound, nose to rump, like any heap of idle, flea-harried house dogs. But every heap has its etiquette: One of the dogs stands, walks 10 feet away from the others, sits, and claws furiously at his neck with a hind leg. Then he returns to his place in the heap. A social nicety, McNutt theorizes, lest he spread his parasites to a neighbor. Another time when he had just collared a dog and was waiting for it to regain consciousness, a sibling darted in, grabbed the dog by the collar, and dragged it back to the safety of the pack.
Their highly evolved social etiquette also bears on much larger issues This heap of dogs, for instance, got its start as a pack in the usual fashion when three brothers from a pack named for mountains joined up with two sisters from a pack named for islands. In any pack, only one male and one female do most of the breeding. The other adults spend their lives helping to rear nieces and nephews. At the moment, in a burrow underneath the termite mound, a female named Cypress (for an island in Puget Sound) is nursing a new litter. She slouches up out of her burrow and approaches one of the other dogs. Dipping her head down under his mouth, she makes a soft mewling sound. His belly begins to heave in response.
By our standards, what follows may sound like an abomination. By theirs, it is selfless everyday caregiving. A nursing female depends on the other dogs to gorge themselves at the kill and then regurgitate back at the den. Some dogs will heave up a portion of their meal seven or eight times a day, especially once the puppies are weaned and begin to beg. The demands of this kind of food-sharing are probably the main reason most packs can support only a single breeding female, and here the social etiquette can turn harsh. To reduce competition, McNutt says, the dominant female will often take over or even kill a sister's litter. These aren't our family values, but they are family values nonetheless. ”If it's a small pack, maybe five or seven animals,“ he says, "they're better off having the experienced hunters out hunting, not back at the den rearing young.”
The hunt begins one afternoon with the arrival of a small procession of ghouls—hooded vultures, a hyena, and us, all waiting for the wild dogs to go out and kill, a chore for which the dogs themselves appear at first to have no great enthusiasm. They drag themselves up from the heap and mill around greeting one another. They lean forward and languidly bridge their back legs out behind. One of them moseys off. ”This, believe it or not, is it,“ McNutt says. The others tag along in loose file, with a desultory wagging of tails.
A subordinate named Blackcomb takes the lead, climbing up on a termite mound to peer over the grass. The pace picks up to a trot when there are antelope in sight, and then drops back to a walk when their prey escape. McNutt's Land Rover lurches and zigzags to keep up, and the vultures and the hyena hopscotch behind. The harsh glare of midday softens and the shadows grow longer and more dangerous. The dogs hunt in eerie silence. We hear a single sharp bark—an impala warning its herd—and the dogs instantly jump their pace up to a full run. They are capable of pursuing their prey at 25 miles an hour, with bursts up to 35. But when we catch up with a couple of dogs a few minutes later, they are disoriented, seeming to have lost sight of one another and their prey. Blackcomb is absent, so McNutt keeps our truck bumping cross- country, in response to whatever he is hearing on his earphones. We find Blackcomb before the other dogs do, with his nose in the warm belly of an impala.
He has made this kill by himself, and the victim's supposedly slow, brutal death appears actually to have been instantaneous. The impala lies in a single bright patch of blood in the grass. Blackcomb feeds, looks up, feeds again, and finally leaves to bring his pack-mates to the kill. The feast that follows takes place, like the hunt, in silence. The dogs grip the carcass from opposite sides, and then lift their heads and yank back in unison, as if on the count of three. The only sound is breaking bone and shredding muscle. Cypress, who has come out from the den, twitters softly, and her sister Gabriola backs away.
”The thing that distinguishes wild dogs is that they're so easygoing with each other,” McNutt remarks. Where wolves would enforce their hierarchy by snarling and showing their teeth, "you can't help but notice how quiet and cooperative the dogs seem to be in the same contexts.” And yet, as Gabriola searches for scraps on the outsklrts of the kill, it's clear that a hierarchy is operating here, too. Because the subordinate adults are last in line at the kill, says McNutt, they'll be more motivated to make a kill next time. The risk of leading the hunt brings a subordinate the reward of cramming its belly for a few minutes, like Blackcomb, before the twinge of social conscience causes it to bring in the rest of the pack. ”It's a neat system.”
Fascinating!