Africa Imagery - Book on Wild Dogs

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Gone to the dogs

A review by Joan Kruger of Wild Magazine

It’s not often that one can lay claim to ‘living a book’. But that’s exactly what happened with the launch of Roger and Pat de la Harpe’s lushly beautiful book In Search of the African Wild Dog.

Launch of: In Search of the African Wild Dog by Roger and Pat de la Harpe
Published by Sunbird Publishers
Hard cover: 160 pages with 200 colour photographs
R350

Imagine sitting in an open safari vehicle in the Northern Tuli Game Reserve a few metres from where the wild dogs, these expert, but elusive, hunters of the plains have made their den. You watch the pups at play and listen to their excited twitters while Roger tells the tale of how he and Pat became increasingly involved in the fate of the African wild dog.

Vermin. Bloodthirsty. Vicious. Pick a description; the wild dog has not had good press up to now. Hated and exterminated, they have been hovering just this side of extinction. But this – you know – is about to change, when you listen to Roger talk with such tender affection about the strong social bonds within the pack and the care they take of their pups: “They look after their little ones with the greatest gentleness, playing with them, minding them, feeding them; the entire society revolves around their pups. When puppies are born it’s Christmas!”

While Roger is talking, the puppies we’re watching are being puppies. One stretches out to sleep, a sibling walks right over his tummy, nips his ear. They tussle – whirling splashes of black, tan and white. The last two adults come back from the hunt and crouch down, regurgitating food for the pups that crowd in on them, squealing and shrieking, eager in their hunger.

Caring they may be, but don’t take them for lapdogs! Roger has photographed two kills by this pack (some wild, some captive-born, 18 in all) that was released in Northern Tuli Game Reserve in April 2008. After spending six months bonding in a boma, upon their release the pack simply continued hanging around for days, waiting for ‘Mr Delivery’ in his bakkie with the fresh impala. Worried looks were exchanged. But then a warthog family stumbled upon the pack. Instinct kicked in. “Within two seconds the dogs had gone from being at rest to bringing down a piglet; twenty seconds later it was gone,” says Roger. The series of pictures in the book record it almost by the second.

The other kill he witnessed was of a young kudu bull, herded against the fence of their old boma and disemboweled. It’s upsetting to witness, Roger concedes, but then, in mitigation, the suffering of the prey is brief: the vital organs are ripped apart immediately ...

In spite of being the deadliest of hunters (they have an average success rate of 90 per cent, lions 30 per cent), wild dogs have been decimated and packs have to be carefully managed as there are barely 500 dogs left in the whole of Southern Africa. Hemmed in by fences and hunted down by humans, wild dogs also come off worst when caught up in a tussle for territory with lions and hyenas. In the book Pat tells of the pack in Thanda where lions had found the den and killed all the pups and the one in Mkhuze that had been all but wiped out by hyenas. In her writing you sense the sadness of everyone involved.

What makes In Search of the African Wild Dog such a special book, is not only the gripping pictures, but also the writing that draws on science and lore, local knowledge and meticulous research.

Roger freely admits that this project that started in 1998 was the most difficult of their 19 books to date. “The logistics! The dogs move at a speed of up to 65 km/h through the veld and you have to try and follow them. When they rest nothing happens for long stretches, and then suddenly, in the blink of an eye, it’s all action.” There’s no time to think, the photographer has to react instinctively.

(You can see some of the amazing pictures Roger took in the spring 2009 issue of Wild magazine, now available at Wild Card partners. Or you can click here to page through the online version)

The book covers the wild dog packs in various parks, from the Kruger National Park, the Limpopo valley parks and Madikwe (North West Province) to certain KwaZulu-Natal parks (Hluhluwe-Imfolozi, Mkhuze and Thanda Private Game Reserve). In many respects it was an excellent choice to have the launch in Northern Tuli Game Reserve in Botswana. The incredibly welcoming Mashatu Lodge, where we stayed, has a very sensible approach to ecotourism: guests at the lodge can accompany the “resident” biologists, Jeanetta Selier (elephant) and André Snyman (leopard) working towards PhDs, on specialist drives where they talk to you about their latest research. Fascinating. A destination well worth considering.

In Search of the African Wild Dog epitomises what can be accomplished by private enterprise (SASOL), art and science when it comes to conservation.

Now it’s up to you as reader/conservationist in your own right to also become a wild dog groupie. It will happen, it will ...

Buy this book here

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