Africa’s Wild Dogs Are the Most Hated Carnivores on the Continent. Here’s How Some Conservationists Are Saving Them Anyway.

Two white pickup trucks are parked beside a highway that cuts through the Waterberg, a South African municipality three hours from Johannesburg. Passing the trucks on foot, you might hear something that makes you stop: Their cargo is panting. Just visible through the holes at the top of three green wooden crates is fur over rib cages, mottled black, white and gold, rising and falling.

The three sleeping female African wild dogs, sisters, have traveled a long way in the past few weeks, even by the standards of their species, which can cover 30 miles a day and occupy ranges of 1,000 miles. They arrived by plane from Karingani Game Reserve in Mozambique, courtesy of the Endangered Wildlife Trust’s African wild dog range expansion program. The project, which started in 1997, has increased the world’s wild dog population by more than 344 in 29 years.

It introduces dogs to wildlife reserves in countries where they haven’t been seen in decades—for instance, Mozambique, where the species disappeared during a civil war that lasted from 1977 to 1992. The Mozambican packs have bred so successfully that the Endangered Wildlife Trust (EWT) is now bringing young dogs to South Africa to form new, genetically diverse packs here. The three sisters have been darted with sedatives, a risky but necessary step in moving them to their new home for the next few weeks—a state-of-the-art enclosure, or boma, the first designed specifically to hold their species—before they’re released, with tracking collars, into the wild.

The sisters represent a not insignificant portion of 6,600 African wild dogs left in the world. According to the World Wildlife Fund, the animals are among the world’s most endangered. Also known as Cape hunting or painted dogs, they resemble large, gangly mongrels with extremities picked from a safari odds-and-ends bin: big, disc-shaped black ears, large paws on skinny legs and fluffy white tails.

Each dog’s fur has a clearly unique pattern of black, gold and white splotches—more Abstract Impressionist than the designs that cover snakes, zebras or leopards. Wild dogs are the most successful hunters in Africa, with a kill rate of 80 percent. Lions, by comparison, kill just 30 percent of what they hunt.

The dogs’ superpower is also part of the reason they are so threatened. Owners of many private game reserves would rather kill them than lose expensive game. Subsistence farmers feel the same way about their livestock.