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Africa's second-most endangered predator breaks out of the reserves created to protect it. Now, biologists are finding that it's own urine can be used to contain it
April 17, 2009 | 4
African wild dogs once roamed throughout sub-Saharan Africa but are now the second-most endangered carnivore on the continent after the Ethiopian wolf.
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A wild dog chases an impala on the Northern Tuli Game Reserve in Botswana.
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The first two litters were born on Tuli in late June, three months after the pack was moved from a fenced park in South Africa.
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Craig Jackson holds up a telemetry antenna looking for a signal from radio collars on the alpha male and female in the pack.
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John McNutt of the Botswana Predator Conservation Trust places a scent mark on the ground—one of over 500 that have been put in place as part of a bio-boundary to keep wild dogs on the open reserve....[More]
Five-year-old Savanna was snared on a farm in South Africa in September after crossing the Limpopo River. Remarkably, he was able to break the fence wire and return to Botswana where Jackson found him that morning at the den....[More]
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4 Comments
Add CommentWe know this works. We have been using dingo faeces to deter foxes around our sanctuary boundaries. It also works to deter possums and other dingo "prey" species. We know that some of our dingoes will not go into well marked alpha dingo territory. We know that we could develop a product to assist farmers in keeping dingoes out of their sheep paddocks. Dr. Michael Parsons has been working on this at Curtin University in Perth Western Australia.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWe sell our "Dingo Doo" to gardeners and chicken keepers to raise funds for our charity - the Australian Dingo Foundation.
Google dingo poo for more info.- Dingo Discovery Centre.
Hey editor:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"It's" = "it is". No exceptions.
The Okavango is not the last or even the biggest wild dog stronghold in Africa. Counting wild dogs is ofcourse not a trivial matter, however there is good evidence that Selous GR in southern Tanzania plus adjoing areas and parks hold substantially more dogs than the Okovango.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe latest results on the chemical composition of African wild dog scents, which will form the basis of the artificial scent marks that will be used to build the BioBoundary can be found at http://www.springerlink.com/content/q25612243661l211/ .
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThere is a brief summary at http://www.bioquicknews.com/node/956
Best regards
Peter Apps