A lioness attacks an African Painted Dog's den (the African Wild Dog Lycaon pictus)

Описание: The 33,000-hectare island of Duba Plains deep in the Okavango Delta teams with wildlife. Its known particularly for its lions and leopards but it also hosts a small pack of Painted Dogs, one of the most endangered mammals on the planet. These dogs are sociable, wide ranging and hunt by running down their prey and tearing them apart with their jaws. They thus need numbers to hunt, lone wild dogs and even pairs struggle to survive due to their hunting strategy. Its not a particularly pretty sight, but once one begins to understand these wonderful hunters, its hard for them not to become one’s favourite African carnivore, well at least not hard for me. But they are incredibly rare, and unless you are lucky enough to work or live in an area with a resident pack one might go an entire lifetime of safari’s without seeing a Painted Dog. On this recent trip to Duba, we had gone in large part to see the resident pack. My wife Jackie had done hundreds of safaris and never seen actual painted dogs in the wild and we had heard from Derek and Beverley Joubert that a small pack of five individuals was running on Duba. We arrived and were fortunate enough to find the pack on the second evening as they hunted. The pack consisted of two females, a heavily pregnant Alpha and her sister and an Alpha male and two younger males. The pack had recently had a rough time of things. In 2021 the two females had given birth to two litters numbering ten pups, but only one had survived to adulthood, the others being taken largely by crocodiles during river crossings. Five is a very small number of dogs for the hunt but this pack was just making it, and the female was due to pup any day. The next day we could not find the dogs, nor the day after. It was only the morning of the next day that we found the dogs, but there were only four. They were lounging about in the heat on a small remote island. The Alpha female was missing, and we were afraid she might have been killed by a lion or other predator. That evening we went back to them and encountered a strange situation. The four remaining dogs were extremely nervous, pacing back and forth and staring into the nearby bush. They even ignored to opportunities to kill warthogs that wandered close to them, but their thin bellies told us they hadn’t fed. One of the young males was limping from an injury he didn’t have when we had seen them that morning. Just as the sun set, the Alpha led the dogs into the dense bush. This was odd as Painted Dogs are diurnal, that is they hunt and move only during the day. We followed the pack into the thick sage brush and that’s when this encounter occurred. Its one of those terrifying events that is both horrifying to watch if you don’t know the outcome, and yet so much part of the primal nature of life and death in the African bush. There are subtitles in the 10-minute video. Do turn up the volume to hear sounds that were certainly a first for me to hear in the African bush. I apologise that some of the shots are grainy, but the whole film is shot in near total darkness at a very high ISO (a Sony A7S3 for those who want to know). I won’t tell you how it ends. Some people may be disturbed by this video.