An African wild dog pack hunts together, as a team. Wild dogs mainly eat antelope, such as gazelles and impalas. They hunt mostly in the early morning and around dusk. Wild dogs hunt in open grassland and savanna, where they live.
How fast can a wild dog run? Scientists in Botswana put GPS collars on a pack. A GPS collar records where a dog is as it moves. The collars measured a top running speed of 68.4 kilometers per hour (19 meters per second) in a chase.
Wild dogs live in packs of about 7 to 15 dogs. Each pack is usually led by one breeding pair, a male and a female. Wild dogs talk to each other with many different sounds.
An African wild dog is about 30 to 43 inches (75 to 110 centimeters) long. It weighs about 18 to 36 kilograms (40 to 79 pounds). It has only four toes on each front foot. Its big, round ears help it stay cool in hot weather. Every wild dog has its own coat pattern.
Long ago, wild dogs lived across most of Africa south of the Sahara. As of November 2026, most live in southern Africa and the southern part of East Africa. As of November 2026, the IUCN, a group that rates how safe each kind of animal is, lists them as Endangered. As of November 2026, about 6,600 African wild dogs, or fewer, are left in the wild.
The biggest danger to wild dogs is habitat loss and fragmentation: wild land cut into small pieces. Wire snares set for bushmeat are also a widespread danger across their range.
A mother wild dog has her pups in an underground den. It is often a burrow that an aardvark dug. A litter can be as few as 2 pups or as many as 20. The whole pack helps feed the pups by bringing meat back to the den. Wild dogs live about 10 to 12 years in the wild.
Words to know
- collar: neck band
- GPS: location tracker
- fragmentation: cut into pieces
- snares: wire loops
- litter: pups born together
