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. 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 use sight, not smell, to find prey.

Wild dogs 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. The African wild dog is considered an obligate meat-eater, meaning it needs meat. A white tail tip is thought to work like a flag that helps the pack keep each other in sight during a hunt. 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.

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. A genome study called the loss of the first digit on the forefeet the most notable characteristic of African wild dogs. A wild dog's big, round ears help it stay cool in hot weather, and every wild dog has its own coat pattern.

Each pack is usually led by one breeding pair, a male and a female. The alpha female chooses where the pack's den will be, and the pack helps her dig it. 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. These are dispersing groups. 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.

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 of African wild dogs, which it equates to under 700 breeding pairs. 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. Wild dogs had been gone from Gorongosa National Park in Mozambique for more than 25 years before 2018, when the Gorongosa Project and the Endangered Wildlife Trust returned a pack of 14 wild dogs to the park.

Words to know

• genome: all its genes
• obligate: must have
• rallies: greeting ceremonies
• dispersing: leaving home
• reintroduced: brought back