Animal Welfare

African Wild Dog Reintroduction and Conservation Program

©Bart Swanson

The African wild dog is critically endangered, with fewer than 5,000 individuals remaining in small areas of its former range. Drs. Michaela Szykman, Steven Monfort, and David Wildt of the Smithsonian National Zoo's Conservation and Research Center have focused on reintroduction strategies to bolster this species in the wild.

With funding from the AZA CEF, the African Wild Dog Reintroduction and Conservation Program seeks to understand individual and pack health, stress, reproductive success, and survival of packs established through reintroductions. The team focused its 2004 CEF award on assessing endocrine physiology as a means of measuring stress in packs of reintroduced wild dogs. Using non-invasive fecal samples, the researchers studied short-term stress during the reintroduction process, and long-term stress resulting from food competition with lions and spotted hyenas. The team was testing the hypothesis that stress in wild dogs may affect disease susceptibility and reproductive health.

In December 2004, the program reintroduced a pack of wild dogs into the KwaZulu-Natal province in eastern South Africa to complement an already existing pack of 34 individuals living in the province. Endocrine samples were collected before each dog was moved and sample collection continued throughout the translocation and after release into the wild. Fecal samples were also collected from the established wild dog population to complete an ecological analysis of competition with other predators in the area.

The research team determined overlapping ranges of carnivores through radio-tracking and spatial analysis and combined these data with physiological monitoring of wild dogs. Preliminary information is very encouraging. With this help from the AZA Conservation Endowment Fund, the wild dog population in the area has increased substantially through births and reintroductions, to almost 100 individuals at the end of 2005.