African wild dogs hunt together as a team, in packs, and they use sight, not smell, to find prey. They mainly eat antelope, such as gazelles and impalas, and they tend to hunt animals that weigh about twice as much as they do. They hunt mostly in the early morning and around dusk. A wild dog's white tail tip is thought to work like a flag that helps the pack keep each other in sight during a hunt.

Scientists put GPS collars on a pack in Botswana. The collars measured a top running speed of 68.4 kilometers per hour (19 meters per second) in a chase. Fact sheets say a wild dog can run up to about 37 to 41 miles an hour for up to 3 miles, but that figure is an estimate, not a measurement. An African wild dog is about 30 to 43 inches (75 to 110 centimeters) long and weighs about 18 to 36 kilograms (40 to 79 pounds).

You may have heard that wild dogs howl like wolves, but in fact, unlike wolves and pet dogs, African wild dogs do not howl. They talk to each other with many different sounds. A wild dog has only four toes on each front foot, and its big, round ears help it stay cool in hot weather. Every wild dog has its own coat pattern.

Wild dogs once lived in 39 countries, but as of November 2026 they live in 14 countries. As of November 2026, about 6,600 African wild dogs, or fewer, are left in the wild, and as of November 2026 the IUCN, a group that rates how safe each kind of animal is, lists them as Endangered. The biggest danger is habitat loss and fragmentation: wild land cut into small pieces. Wire snares set for bushmeat and diseases that spread from domestic dogs, such as rabies and canine distemper, are also dangers.

Wild dogs live in packs of about 7 to 15 dogs, and each pack is usually led by one breeding pair, a male and a female. A pack's home range is the area where it lives, and it can be 200 to 2,000 square kilometers. Young wild dogs often leave their birth pack in single-sex groups of brothers or sisters, usually littermates.

The alpha female chooses where the pack's den will be, and the pack helps her dig it. A mother wild dog has her pups in an underground den, often a burrow that an aardvark dug. A newborn litter has around 10 to 11 pups, of about 310 grams (11 ounces) each. Wild dog pups are weaned at about five weeks old. The whole pack helps feed them by bringing meat back to the den.

Words to know

• prey: hunted animals
• weaned: off mother's milk
• estimate: careful guess
• fragmentation: cut into pieces
• littermates: pups born together