Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
at hunting animals such as impala. They often chase their prey in relays,
while other members of the pack peel to the left and right and execute pincer
movements to block attempts at escape.
If
Lycaon
wild dogs were ever tamed by tribes in south and east Africa, we
have no record of it. While they could in theory be tamed, the results might
have been hard to live with. The anal glands of
Lycaon
, like those of hyenas,
produce a sickening odor.
The same puzzle arises with the wild dogs of India. Reddish wild dogs
(dhole,
Cuon alpinus
), remote relatives of the African wild dogs, are still found
in India, though only about 2,500 remain on the subcontinent. I glimpsed
a pack of them near Mudumalai in Tamil Nadu, but they fl ed before I could
photograph them. These dogs, too, seem not to have been domesticated,
though why they should not have been remains a puzzle.
Brian Houghton Hodgson, an English civil servant and amateur natural-
ist who served in northern India during the fi rst half of the nineteenth cen-
tury, succeeded in raising a dhole cub and found it responsive to his training.
An account of his ef orts in the
Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London
for
1833 (p. 121) says:
Adults in captivity made no approach towards domestication; but a young one, which Mr.
Hodgson obtained when it was not more than a month old, became sensible to caresses, dis-
tinguished the dogs of its own kennel from others, as well as its keeper from strangers; and
in its own conduct manifested to the full as much intelligence as any of [Hodgson's] sporting
dogs of the same age.
But Hodgson does not say whether the puppy began to smell noxious as
it grew into an adult, or what its ultimate fate was.
Dholes might have been dii cult to live with, but surely Indian wolves
Africa to Southeast Asia and Australia, modern humans have occupied the
southern part of that subcontinent for at least 50,000 years. And wolves
were plentiful in India. Why were wolves not domesticated there as well as
in East Asia?
For most of that 50,000 years, contacts between humans and the wild
world of the forests and jungles must have been part of everyday life. Stories
