Scientists studied a pack of African wild dogs in Botswana's Okavango Delta by fitting GPS collars to the dogs. The collars measured a top running speed of 68.4 kilometers per hour (19 meters per second) in a chase. In one study of collared wild dogs in Botswana, the average chase covered about 447 meters. The study pack traveled about 13.2 kilometers a day on average, measured with GPS collars. In the Okavango Delta study area, over 80 percent of the prey that African wild dogs capture is impala, though the paper takes this from earlier work, and the collars did not record prey.

African wild dogs hunt together as a team, in packs. They use sight, not smell, to find prey, and they tend to hunt animals that weigh about twice as much as they do. They mainly eat antelope, such as gazelles and impalas, and 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.

Wild dogs talk to each other with many different sounds. 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. Wild dogs also hold high-energy greeting ceremonies called social rallies after periods of rest.

A pack has 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. The alpha female chooses where the pack's den will be, and the pack helps her dig it. 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, and the whole pack helps feed them by bringing meat back to the den. Young wild dogs often leave their birth pack in single-sex groups of brothers or sisters, usually littermates.

Long ago, wild dogs lived across most of Africa south of the Sahara, and they once lived in 39 countries. 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, which means wild land is cut into small pieces. Wild dogs had been gone from Gorongosa National Park in Mozambique for more than 25 years before 2018. In 2018 the Gorongosa Project and the Endangered Wildlife Trust returned a pack of 14 wild dogs to the park.

Words to know

• collars: tracking neckbands
• rallies: greeting ceremonies
• prey: hunted animals
• weaned: off mother's milk
• littermates: pups born together