Natural History

It was a dhole (Cuon alpinus)– literally “mountain dog.”

This animal is also known as the red dog, the Asiatic wild dog, or the Indian wild dog. Its range is not restricted to India, but that is where it was probably first encountered by British zoologists. However, its range extended through Asia into the Russian Far East and Siberia in historic times, and the animals proably still live there in small, relict populations.  Originally though, dholes were found throughout Eurasia and even parts of North America. Yes, there were once dholes in North America.

These are pack hunting dogs, just like certain members of the genus Canis and the African wild dog (or as I call it –“the painted wolf,” which is a literal translation of its scientific name.)  The best way to understand where it fits in terms of taxonomy is that it is like that of the harlequin-splotched painted wolf. It is relative of Canis.

The dhole and the African wild dog are derived from the ancestral line that gave us the animals in the genus Canis. However, they are genetically quite distinct.

The two species are similar in their behavior. They both live in packs and hunt large game, just like wolves and Eastern coyotes (and some feral domestic dogs.)  What’s interesting, though, is that dholes and painted wolves aren’t that closely related– no more than they are related to wolves and coyotes.

It’s very likely that these animals developed pack hunting as a result of parallel evolution.  Pack forming behavior in wild dogs is generally associated with wild dog species that need to kill large prey species. (Some exceptions to this rule exist. Ethiopian wolves live in large packs, but they don’t hunt any large game. They live mostly on rodents. The Bush dog of South America also forms large packs, but because they weigh 15 pounds at most, the size of their prey is greatly limited. Also, jackals will hunt in packs, as will Western and Southern subspecies of coyotes under certain circumstances.)

Now, lots of legends have developed about dholes. One of these is that they are a major threat to wolves. The reason why this legend even developed is that dholes form larger packs than wolves do. They have been seen in groups number up to 40 individuals. However, dholes are coyote-sized,  and are generally very nervous and secretive animals. It is very unlikely that they would be a major threat to wolves. If the two are in the same area, it is much more likely that wolves would have the upper hand, despite the size of the dhole’s packs.

This legend is even more embellished in the story “Red Dog” from Kipling’s The Second Jungle Book. When I first read that particularly story as a young boy, I thought of the red dogs as a swarming horde of pillaging jungle curs. I later looked up the exact species, because I thought Kipling was writing about an animal from mythology. Well, the animal in question was real, but the behavior of the dhole n the Kipling story was mythological. Real dholes don’t act anything like the red dogs.

Dholes have a few other interesting traits. They make lots of weird noises. They make whistle-calls to each other in the forest. They also cluck and mew.

I’ve always found dholes rather interesting. If you want to find out more about them, check out The Dhole Home Page. The numbers of dhole continue to drop throughout its range.  These animals need lots of habitat to survive, and that habitat is under threat from increasing human populations and increased over-exploitation of natural resources (especially logging) in the dhole’s range. In some parts of their range, dholes are seen as a threat to livestock, so they are poisoned and shot. They are also caught in snares set for other animals.

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Dholes are actually easier to domesticate than wolves. If captured as small pups, they can become quite tame. Historically, forest dwelling peoples in the dhole’s range have driven it off its kills and taken the meat for themselves, for it was well-known that dholes are not aggressive in defending their food. Because they were so passive and so easily tamed, the British naturalist and ethnologist Brian Houghton Hodgson believed that the dhole, which he called Canis primaevus,  was the ancestor of the domestic dog. He claimed that the head was also very similar to the domestic dog, although if one looks at a dhole’s teeth, they are very different from any other species of dog. Hodgson kept several as pets, and he found them as trainable as domestic dogs. After all, aren’t most “primitive” Asian dogs red in color?

Now, of course, that’s all nonsense. But it’s interesting that one could tame the dholes. I’ve also read of accounts of pariah dogs (the Indian equivalent of dingoes) hunting in packs that include dholes.

Dholes are not the ancestors of the domestic dog, but accounts like these does lead me to wonder why man never domesticated the dhole. Why was the wolf the animal that man domesticated?

Maybe wolves were originally dhole-like, and maybe they were originally very curious about people. The fact that dholes live in huge packs tells us that they are socially quite tolerant animals. And accounts of unexploited packs of North American wolves in the early nineteenth century seem to point to the fact that wolves were once similarly socially tolerant. The size of those wolf packs mirrors those of modern dholes. Perhaps they were like dholes in that they were very easy to approach and easy to socialize and imprint when very young.

Modern wolves then underwent a selection for the exact opposite behavior when we began our widespread, almost paranoid, persecution of that species. By killing them using so many different poisons and traps, we made sure that the only wolves left in the gene pool were very fearful, cautious, and emotionally reactive. And that’s why modern wolves are so difficult to tame, and why they are such unsuitable pets.

I don’t have any hard answers, but I do think that wolves had to have been so easy to domesticate that a cave man could do it.