Samburu-Laikipia Wild Dog Project

The Samburu-Laikipia Wild Dog Project was started in January 2001 to investigate strategies for coexistence of African wild dogs with people and livestock. Wild dogs became extinct in Laikipia and southern Samburu during the mid-1980s, but have recently recolonized much of  the area, and their numbers continue to increase. The regional population is currently over 100 dogs.

The Human Aspect
People and livestock inhabit virtually the entire Samburu and Laikipia Districts in northern Kenya. The return of wild dogs to the area has been enthusiastically welcomed by many local people, including Samburu and Maasai pastoralists, primarily because they see wild dogs as an asset for their developing ecotourism industry. The conservation focus of many of the local community leaders makes this a crucial and promising area for the conservation of this highly endangered species.

Threats
Although once widespread throughout sub-Saharan Africa, only 3,000 - 5,000 wild dogs remain in the wild. Wild dogs range widely, so they need large areas to survive, and are very sensitive to habitat fragmentation. Outside national parks and reserves, farmers often kill wild dogs because they fear they will kill livestock. Unfortunately, wild dogs rarely recognize the boundaries of reserves, and wander into human-dominated areas where they are exposed to persecution as well as to road accidents, accidental snaring, and domestic dog diseases.

WCS Activities
Our current research aims to understand whether--and how--wild dogs can coexist with people and livestock in the long term. We expect that our findings will be extended beyond northern Kenya to other parts of Africa. In Samburu-Laikipia, we are working with local people to determine the true economic losses caused by wild dog predation on livestock, to generate advice on how farmers can minimize livestock losses, and to assess the disease threat that domestic dogs pose to wild dogs. We are monitoring the Samburu-Laikipia wild dog population using radiotelemetry and camera traps, as well as through reports from local people. We have placed radio-collars on three packs thus far, and plan to increase our use of GPS collars in order to obtain a more detailed picture of how wild dogs use their range, particularly in response to human pressure.  When wild dogs do kill livestock, we gather information that helps us characterize herds that are attacked: this will help to inform farmers on how to avoid losing stock.   We are also taking blood samples from domestic dogs, as well as jackals, hyenas and other species, to assess the local disease threats to wild dogs, and develop recommendations on how to reduce these threats. Much of this information is being gathered by local community liaison officers and game scouts, whom we have trained in data-collection methods. These arrangements, which have sparked great enthusiasm among community leaders and officers alike, combine data-collection with community liaison, education, and capacity-building.

Important Next Steps
We plan to build upon a newly-established collaboration with the Botswana Wild Dog Research Project, to investigate how our results can be applied to the conservation of wild dogs in southern Africa. Given the disctinct systems of land tenure and livestock husbandry in the two study areas, we anticipate that ecological insights may be similar in the two areas, but technical and policy recommendations could differ.