African Wild Dogs (Part 4)
That Old Cat and Dog Thing
by Richard Conniff
On the way back to camp, McNutt speculates on why wild dogs have evolved into such thoroughly social creatures. They typically travel in packs of about 10 individuals, in part because group living comes at little cost. The most one dog, weighing 40 to 80 pounds, can stuff down its gut at a feeding is about 10 pounds of meat. But their prey average more than 100 pounds. So food for one is food for a crowd. Each extra mouth also brings a pair of those acutely sensitive satellite-dish ears, for added vigilance against ”kleptoparasites” like the hyenas, which might easily steal the kill of a solitary dog. The pack also provides protection against the bane of wild dog life—lions.
One evening when Blackcomb is again leading the hunt, he suddenly stops for no visible reason and rears up on his hind legs. His brother Tremblant joins him, peering a hundred yards ahead and making a low, rolling ru-ru-ru growl, which means there's a lion out there. The lion yawns massively in the face of the four dogs.
"It's that old cat-and-dog thing,” McNutt remarks. The lion eventually gets up and plods off into a field of phragmites, the feathery seed heads backlit by the setting sun so they flame like a thousand torches. Blackcomb and the others follow, close enough to nip at the lion's haunches. The lion spins on them and snaps, but continues his retreat.
Then two more lions appear and the dogs suddenly recall, with a parting ru-ru-ru, that they had an appointment with an impala on the far side of town. In one study, predators—almost always lions—killed 42 percent of all wild dog juveniles and 22 percent of the adults. Humans are the other great cause of wild dog mortality, and these two factors, combined with the footloose behavior of the species, are the reason wild dogs present such a challenge for conservation.
Except during the denning season, wild dogs seldom stay in one place for more than a day or two. In the Okavango, a typical pack wanders through a home range of about 175 square miles, and more than four times that in the Serengeti. Few national parks in modern Africa are big enough to sustain a healthy population of wild dogs. And in almost every national park, the dominant species—and the most popular tourist attraction—is the lion. If the dogs seek refuge from lions by going outside the parks, they quickly come into conflict with humans, usually after they kill one of the cattle that have displaced their traditional prey.
Thus until the 1990s many attempts to repopulate parks with wild dogs failed dismally: "Starved or killed by lions within months ... Shot on nearby farm ... Left the reserve and were poisoned.” The first important exception was at Madikwe Game Reserve, a day's drive from the Okavango, on South Africa's border with Botswana. Madikwe is an experiment, an artificial park of about 290 square miles, created over the past 19 years on derelict ranchland, primarily to bring tourist revenue into South Africa's Northwest Province, and only secondarily for conservation. It's enclosed by a fence 110 miles long, built with steel reinforcing cable and a 7,000-volt electric wire. The consortium that created the park established a balanced population of predators, including just enough lions to gratify tourists. But they chose to make wild dogs a featured attraction. One Madikwe staffer puts it this way: "Lions are common as muck in South Africa. Wild dogs are not.”
Madikwe got its wild dog population started in 1995 by putting together a sort of blind date between wild-caught males and captive-bred females. Two packs now coexist there, and their offspring routinely get shipped out as they approach maturity, helping to form new populations at six other nature reserves, game reserves, and national parks around South Africa. To maintain genetic diversity, these parks swap breeding stock according to studbook guidelines, much as zoos do now. What Madikwe promises is a future in modern Africa for wild dogs—if only as a managed, marketed, and fenced-in species.
This is an approach Tico McNutt finds deeply, almost inexpressibly, disturbing. "I don't believe we're going to get very far,” he says carefully one evening when we are out watching dogs, "if we justify conservation only by assigning an economic value to an animal or an ecosystem. Surely that's not the only reason. It's not the reason I'm interested in conservation.”
Even the creators of Madikwe argue that it would be better to preserve existing wilderness than to attempt to re-create it. But they also say that economic values are what actually motivate people to save a wild area in the first place.
“You don't realize its value until it's gone, and then it takes an enormous amount of capital to reestablish it,” says Richard Davies, the original project manager for Madikwe. As of 2008, the North West Parks Board has put about 250 million rand (US $31.5 million) into the park, and earns about 20 million rand (US $2.5 million) in fees a year. Private companies operating 30 tourist lodges within Madikwe have invested another 500 million rand (US $62 million). The Parks Board says it does not track how much the lodges are earning, but most lodge employees come from surrounding communities, and two communities own lodges directly. ”There's a really strong lesson here for countries to the north of us that are squandering their wildlife,” says Davies, and he means Botswana in particular.