Tumaren

Wim, on 22 Nov 2007

That’s wonderful (well, maybe not if you’re a Waterbuck). I had absolutely no idea there were wild dogs in that area (I had no idea there were any left in Kenya), and such a huge pack too. I’m excited and I wasn’t even there.

Wim, on 22 Nov 2007

Hello James
yes, I thought Wild Dogs were very much a southern African thing these days. I had no idea they’d developed such a presence in the area. Have they been reintroduced/managed or did they just bleed back in from other populations? Huge mobs of dogs and Oryx shish-kebabs, it’s all happening there!

James, on 23 Nov 2007

Here is a website where you can learn more about Wilddogs and some people who are working very hard on their conservation here.

http://www.wcs.org/international/Africa/kenya/samburulaikipia

James, on 23 Nov 2007

luck plus some tenacity. part of the diligence now is the immunization of domestic dogs against rabies in masai manyattas so that that disease is not passed on to the wilddogs. the obvious side benefit is that the disease would be even less of a threat to the human population (I’m not aware of any cases here but surely they have existed in the past)

James, on 23 Nov 2007

very happy to have a provocative blog even though i had to use spellcheck to see how to spell provocative correctly. Below is a snippet on rabies from a paper that was written by Rossie Woodroffe and Joshua R. Ginsberg. Rossie works in our area on the wilddog project linked to above as I imagine Joshua does/did too. the link to the paper is:

http://www.canids.org/PUBLICAT/AWDACTPL/4causes.htm#viruses

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Rabies Virus

Rabies is a rhabdovirus which may infect all mammals. In North America and Europe, populations of wild carnivores such as racoons and red foxes represent the major reservoir for the virus, but in Africa, as well as Asia and South America, poorly supervised domestic dogs are the principal host (Baer & Wandeler 1987). Rabies represents a major threat to endangered canids: one epidemic halved the population of Ethiopian wolves in the Bale Mountains National Park, Ethiopia (Sillero-Zubiri et al. 1996), while another threatened the Blanford’s fox in Israel (Macdonald 1996).

Rabies is known to cause high mortality in wild dogs. In 1989, a well-studied pack living at Aitong, outside the Masai Mara National Reserve, Kenya, was decimated by rabies (Kat et al. 1995). The following year, at least one wild dog died of rabies in the adjoining Serengeti National Park, Tanzania (Gascoyne et al. 1993). Wild dog packs under study in the Serengeti ecosystem disappeared in 1991, and, although the ultimate cause is not certain, rabies is the most likely culprit (Burrows 1992). The circumstances surrounding the Serengeti extinction are discussed in detail in Appendix 1. Rabies is also known to have killed wild dogs in the Central African Republic (A.K.Turkalo pers. comm.) and in Namibia (Scheepers & Venzke 1995), and is believed to have killed dogs in Zimbabwe (C.M. Foggin, cited in Kat et al. 1995) and Zambia (K.Buk pers. comm.).

Rabies virus is transmitted principally by biting. In the Aitong pack, infected animals joined in with group activities such as greetings and cooperative hunting, but were often attacked by other group members (Kat et al. 1995). This led to biting and, presumably, transmission of the virus. Infected animals became disoriented and lost their appetites, but chewed and consumed non-food items. They became ataxic and progressively paralysed (Kat et al. 1995). These symptoms are similar to those of ‘dumb’ rabies in domestic dogs (Baer & Wandeler 1987).

The few data available on rabies dynamics in wild dogs suggest that the infection would be unlikely to persist in their populations. The disease spread rapidly through the Aitong pack: the time from the first suspected infection of a single pack member to the death of the last of the 21 dogs that died was less than two months (Kat et al. 1995). Since transmission of the virus between pack members is rapid, the incubation period is short, and mortality seems very high, the virus would probably cause its own local extinction before it could be transmitted to another pack (Kat et al. 1995; Mills 1993). Rather than persisting in wild dogs, rabies is probably maintained in the populations of other hosts, which act as a reservoir from which infection occasionally spills over into wild dogs. Rabies is endemic in the domestic dog populations of some areas surrounding the Serengeti ecosystem (Cleaveland & Dye 1995), and the virus which decimated the Aitong pack was genetically indistinguishable from one isolated from local domestic dogs (Kat et al. 1995). Thus, in this case domestic dogs appear to have been the reservoir host for rabies. However, in southern Africa wild canids, such as jackals and foxes, may be more important in maintaining the infection (Nel 1993).