The first time I ever went to the Kruger National Park, I wanted to see the big five. My eyes were sore from looking for lion. Then we saw something I found rather boring – three litters of African wild dog puppies. We spotted them in a ditch because there were two mamas standing sentry in the road and one with the pups. There were at least 12 puppies. I took two or three bad photographs and on we went.
It was only afterwards that I realised these are the rarest and most endangered animals in the park – African wild dogs, aka painted wolves. There are only 5000 left in the whole of Africa. I thought in the beginning that they were hyena.
I thought the picture was of a hyena, but the markings are different. Always a shame when a species goes from endangered to extinct in a generation. The wild dogs, although indigenous to Africa are dwindling and if we aren’t careful they will go the way of the dodo. We know more about the planet today than we did 50 years ago and yet we are still not doing enough to protect it. Time to move away from destruction to conservation imho.