From Brehms’s Life of Animals (1896):
[T]he Striped Wolf (Canis adustus) [is] an mediate Species, animal resembling both the Wolf and the Jackal. The body is elongated; the head of a conical shape, pointed toward the snout, not unlike that of the Fox; the eyes have a slanting position; the ears are widely separated, like those of the Jackal, and rounded; the legs are strikingly long and slender. The tail reaches to the ground.
“The Striped Wolf,” says Pechuel-Loesche, who observed him in Lower Guinea, especially in Loango, in the wilderness as well as tamed, “is statelier and has longer legs than the Fox. He has the same sly expression of the face, but suggests also a decidedly better disposition and has a more aristocratic bearing. These Wolves are remarkably agile, lithe animals,freedom. Not only did he run around in the enclosure and visit our rooms, but he prowled around for hours in our plantations and the forests of the neighborhood. He searched for Beetles and Grasshoppers, playfully jumping after those that whirred away, and also caught many an unwary little mammal or bird. Unfortunately he did not catch the Rats which had become quite a plague in our camp. He left the poultry alone after once having received a slight castigation for catching a Hen. When after this he regarded some forbidden dainty with covetous eyes, a mild word or a slight remonstrance was sufficient to turn him from his evil way. Sometimes he strayed from the enclosure and remained away all day, but he always made his appearance in the dining-room at night to receive a few scraps. If he was forgotten for a longer time than he deemed proper, he pushed his nose against the leg of some one present, or, like and it affords one great pleasure to observe their movements. They come quite close to human dwellings, for the village Dogs never think of picking a quarrel with them; neither do the natives, who callthem ‘Mbulu,’ harm them. The Mbulu utters his shrill, long-drawn yelp in the morning and evening all the year round; it is so loud that a newcomer may be quite startled when he hears it in the immediate proximity of a village or encampment. The piteous cries of a Mbulu once brought us to the edge of a bushy little forest just in time to rescue the animal from a huge Snake which was strangling it.
We frequently kept half-grown Striped Wolf. One of them grew to be a very stately animal, and was so tame and docile that he was given unlimited [attention?] a Dog, put his head on somebody’s knee. He accepted everything thankfully: bread, beans, rice, fish, meat, even raw bananas, or oil nuts; but he could crush only the smallest bones with his teeth. If one of us paid him attention or spoke to him kindly he would look into our eyes with a greatly pleased and affectionate expression, like a Dog, but very seldom wagged his tail. The human voice produced an impression on him such as I have seen exhibited only by the Gorilla; it literally seemed to fascinate him” (196-197).
This animal is no longer called “the striped wolf.” (I am not sure if it is still referred to by this name in German.) Canis adustus is now called the side-striped jackal, and although it appears to have been an intermediate between the wolf and jackal in terms of its morphology. All of the genetic evidence that has been compiled suggests that this jackal is a close relative of the black-backed jackal, and like its black-backed relative is more distantly related to the wolf and dog species than the dhole and African wild dog, which have traditionally been regarded as belonging to genera distinct from Canis.
The discussion of the tame one is quite interesting. Some accounts of dog and fox hybrids talk about large gray or reddish fox-like dogs with white tipped tails. Most of these accounts are from Britain, and I think that these so-called fox-dogs or doxes are actually escaped side-striped jackals that different people involved in colonial service may have brought back as either menagerie curiosities or unusual pets.
Dogs and red foxes cannot hybridize, but I imagine that a cross between certain dogs and the red fox would look something like a side-striped jackal. The side-striped jackal always has a white-tipped tail, as do virtually all red foxes.
Side-striped jackal pup.
