#Big wild dogs series#
In 2014, a dramatic series of photographs from Sabi Sands Game Reserve in South Africa showed lions ambushing a pack of dogs as they forded a river, and killing the alpha male. Rather than merely stealing their kills, the big cats often take down the dogs themselves. Showing off the same well-oiled coordination they use so effectively to hunt, wild dogs in a team can impressively gang up on a hyena or two – and even square off against a small clan, as this footage from Kruger National Park shows:Īs the Mana Pools incident demonstrates, lions are a much more serious threat. One-on-one, wild dogs aren't much of a match for a burly, bone-crushing hyena, but a large pack is quite capable of defending its spoils.
The cackling carnivores are notorious kleptoparasites of wild dogs, sometimes trailing a hunting pack and then attempting to drive it off the kill (they have good reason to shadow the dogs, which have a famously high hunting success rate).
That means, diet-wise, they overlap more with spotted hyenas than with lions. Wild dogs are mainly hunters of small to midsized antelope such as impala, but they'll try their luck with animals as large as wildebeest and zebra.
Looking to cut down on the competition, lions readily kill spotted hyenas, leopards, cheetahs – and, yes, wild dogs, which in many areas are the least abundant large carnivore to begin with. As the biggest terrestrial carnivore in Africa (and a social one at that), the lion's at the top of the predator pecking order. Rare as it is for people to actually see a violent drama like this play out, there's certainly precedent for it.
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