I feel a small squirm at the thought of watching an animal ripped to shreds before me.
“If they’re not quick, the dogs will disembowel them,” Chief shrugs as he watches. The sounds of the showdown grow the hyenas forced out of their central spot and running from their pursuers with their odd seesawing gait. It watches the show, its screwed-up face lopsided and bizarre, showing none of the hyena’s usual malcontent. There must be a hyena den nearby see there, a young one.” He points his long riding whip to the right there hunched in the long yellow grass, hardly visible, a hyena barely more than year old, with the soft furred hide of a youngster. “If they come across each other’s pups they will kill them. “They’re mortal enemies,” Chief says to us as we watch the spectacle, Montagues v the Capulets. We watch as the wily wolves duck in to snap and snatch at their quarry’s haunches the hyenas sitting down to protect their precious tendons, lashing out at the dogs with powerful jaws. There, hardly 10-metres away, two large Spotted Hyenas stand back to back as the pack of dogs run rings around them, like swirling black rice in the wind, ducking and weaving and snarling their high-pitched chorus. We canter down the track, our horses keen and straining at the bits, jumping at shadows as the racket continued. “Quickly, come, it’s hyenas fighting wild dogs!” Chief said, his voice carried by the whistling wind. It sounded like a death cry of a baited bear, cornered. And another low baying beneath it, a yowling that makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand stiff in the chill. As the scrub clears a high-pitched yipping is carried to us on the wind the eerie ‘twitter’ of the dog, their rousing cry of excitement normally reserved for spilt blood. My homebred Deanerys snatches a mouthful of the sweet green grass poking its head out of the molapos, before trotting to catch up. Chief, our guide with his tasselled leather boots and beaten up cowboy hat, shrugs at the inevitable and took another sandy path, eked out of the thorn scrub by something far bigger than us. We canter after them but they have disappeared like mist in the face of sunshine, the ultimate bush babies. They’re remarkably fast swimmers, moving jerky quick like fleas, forging the opposite bank and melting into the bush. They pause and sniff in our direction before bounding through the flooded pan before them, at least 15 of them, leaping so the water splashes stiff white around them before finally swimming, black heads like a pod of furred, fanged dolphins. Painted Wolves, with their sleek bodies and rounded Mickey Mouse ears. Rounding a bend in the ribboned elephant track we’ve been travelling on and there, a pack of Wild Dogs, on the trail of their first light hunt. We’ve barely been riding 20-minutes when the first sighting occurs. A rare contrast to the torridity of the previous week. Today he sports his quilted snow jacket, the hood pulled up and over his helmet. Ahead of me trots the black domed head of guest Chuck 86-years-old and in the saddle hard every day, a remarkable feat.
WILD DOGS VS.HYENAS SKIN
I’m rugged up a silk scarf around my throat and layers that can be peeled off one at a time like an onion skin as the day heats up. The pack will settle down for several weeks while the pups are growing, going out to hunt twice a day and bringing food back in thier bellies which they will regurgitate for the mother and pups to eat.Īt some point, however, in a strange twist, the mother will join in the hunts - being the Alpha female with lots of experience- and several designated "babysitters, usually males, will stay behind.īecause the entire pack contributes to the raising of one large litter of puppies a year, African wild dog puppies catch on quick, and may be seen out hunting with the pack by the time they are 6 months old.They say it has snowed in South Africa, and its frosted breath has travelled creeping blue down south to us tickling the Delta’s underbelly and slicing the temperatures in half. In the world of wild dogs it is the submissive animal who can most fervently beg that tends to eat first.įood is distributed to the youngest pack members and sometimes the Alpha pair are actually be the last dogs to eat. The entire pack helps in the rearing of this one litter. Within the pack generally only the dominant male and female, called the Alpha pair, will reproduce.Īfter a six week pregnancy the Alpha female will find a safe place, often an abandoned aardvark den, where she may deliver up to 20 puppies in a single litter - the most in the canine kingdom!
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