Wild dogs hold high-energy greeting ceremonies called social rallies after periods of rest. Researchers recorded details of 68 social rallies from 5 wild dog packs in the Okavango Delta, Botswana, to see what happens before a pack sets off. Before the sneeze study, it was thought that wild dogs were just clearing their airways when they sneezed. In the sneeze study, the more sneezes during a rally, the more likely the pack was to leave. Without the dominant pair about 10 sneezes were needed, but with them only a few. You may have heard that wild dogs howl like wolves, but unlike wolves and pet dogs, African wild dogs do not howl. A wild dog that gets lost or separated from its pack makes a bell-like sound called a hoo call.

Researchers fitted every dog in one pack of six adults in the Okavango Delta with GPS and motion collars and recorded 1,119 valid chases. Collars on the study pack recorded 300 readings a second of motion and 5 a second of position while the dogs ran. The dogs made an average of 2.43 chases per dog per day, and the average chase covered about 447 meters. The collars measured a top running speed of 68.4 kilometers per hour (19 meters per second) in a chase. The study pack traveled about 13.2 kilometers a day on average, and wild dogs cover double the distance of cheetahs each day, the Botswana study reported.

A genome study called the loss of the first digit on the forefeet the most notable characteristic of African wild dogs, and a wild dog has only four toes on each front foot. The 2019 genome study sequenced one high-coverage African wild dog genome and used three genomes that other scientists had already reported. It found the African wild dog the most specialized of the canids it compared for cursorial adaptations, the body features for running. The African wild dog is considered an obligate meat-eater, meaning it needs meat. Wild dogs use sight, not smell, to find prey, and they tend to hunt animals that weigh about twice as much as they do.

Young wild dogs often leave their birth pack in single-sex groups of brothers or sisters, usually littermates. Between 2016 and 2019, researchers caught at least one dog from 16 dispersing groups with tranquilizing darts to fit GPS collars across the Kavango-Zambezi region. Dispersing wild dogs tracked in southern Africa traveled a maximum of 33 miles in a day. Wild dogs once lived in 39 countries, and as of November 2026 they live in 14 countries. As of November 2026, the WildCRU conservation research group says the world has fewer than 700 packs, and one conservation group reports only around 1,400 mature wild dogs left in the wild.

As of November 2026, the IUCN, a group that rates how safe each kind of animal is, rates the wild dog Endangered under criterion C2a(i), which counts the number of mature individuals. The biggest danger is habitat loss and fragmentation, and wire snares and diseases that spread from domestic dogs are also dangers. From the late 1990s into the 2000s, wild dogs were reintroduced into fenced reserves in South Africa within their former range. As of November 2026, South Africa's wild dog breeding packs rose from an estimated 34 in 2000 to 69 in 2024.

Words to know

• rally: greeting ceremony
• cursorial: built for running
• genome: all its genes
• dispersing: leaving home
• canids: dog family