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Episode 408: Dog-Like African Doggos
- 2024/11/25
- 再生時間： 10 分
- ポッドキャスト
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サマリー
あらすじ・解説
Thanks to Lydia and "warblrwatchr" for this week's suggestions! Further reading: Sweet tooth: Ethiopian wolves seen feeding on nectar The African wild dog is not actually a dog and eats lots of things: The aardwolf is not a dog at all and eats insects: The Ethiopian wolf is not a dog (or a wolf or a fox) and eats rodents and nectar [photo by Adrien Lesaffre and taken from this page]: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. This week we’re going to talk about three dog-like animals from Africa, suggested by Lydia and “warblrwatchr,” even though none of the three animals are dogs. We’ll start with one of Lydia’s suggestions, the African wild dog, also called the painted dog or painted wolf. Despite those names, it’s not very closely related to dogs and wolves. It’s the only species in its own genus, although it is a member of the family Canidae. Colonizers from Europe thought the animal was just a feral dog, not anything special that should be protected, and they also brought domestic dogs with them to Africa. Domestic dogs mean diseases that other canids can catch. Between introduced diseases, farmers killing the animals to keep them away from livestock, and habitat loss, the African wild dog is endangered. Luckily, these days conservation groups have been working to protect the animal, and its numbers are increasing slowly in Kenya’s national parks in particular. The African wild dog is a tall, strong canid with great big ears and no dewclaws. It has a yellowish coat with black blotches and some white spots, including a white tail tip, although some subspecies have darker coats. Unlike most canids, its fur is bristly and doesn’t have a soft undercoat, and as the dog ages, it loses its fur until old dogs are nearly bald. It’s very social, as canids almost always are, and its varied coat pattern helps individuals recognize friends and pack-mates at a distance. The African wild dog prefers savannas and other open areas. It hunts in packs and mostly preys on antelopes, although it will also kill zebras and other large animals, and individual dogs will sometimes catch small animals like hares and rodents. The African wild dog pack isn’t especially hierarchical. The males of the pack are mainly led by the dominant male, while the females are mainly led by the oldest female, who is usually the most dominant. The dominant pair is usually the only pair that has babies. A mother dog has up to 16 pups at a time but only one litter a year. In a lot of animals, as the babies grow up, the males are usually the ones who are driven out of the pack or leave on their own to find a new pack. In the African wild dog, females are the ones who leave as they grow up. Sometimes the females join a different pack and sometimes they start their own. Either way, it stops a pack from becoming inbred. The African wild dog is extremely vocal, making lots of different sounds to communicate with its pack-mates. It sounds a lot more like a bird than a dog. This is what African wild dogs sound like: [doggo sounds] Next, Lydia and warblrwatchr wanted to learn about the aardwolf, which lives in eastern and southern Africa. Unlike the African wild dog, which is mostly active during the day, the aardwolf is nocturnal. It spends most of the day in a burrow, sometimes one it digs itself, but more often one that another animal dug and abandoned at some point. The aardwolf has black stripes on a yellowish or reddish coat, a mane of long hair down its neck and back, large ears, and a bushy tail. It’s about the size of a big dog, about 20 inches tall at the shoulders, or 50 cm, but it looks like a small, slender hyena. That’s because it is actually a type of hyena, although it’s not closely related to other hyenas. Hyenas look dog-like but they aren’t canids at all. In fact, they’re more closely related to cats than to dogs,