Dholes are highly social, cooperative pack hunters native to South and Southeast Asia. Classified as Endangered, they face threats from habitat loss, prey depletion, and persecution that threaten both their populations and individual welfare.
Dhole welfare is primarily a conservation welfare problem — their highly social nature means that pack disruption through hunting, disease, or habitat fragmentation causes both population decline and individual suffering. Dholes that lose pack members lose cooperative hunting capacity, reducing their ability to take prey and increasing individual nutritional stress. Disease transmission from domestic dogs represents a recurring welfare emergency in areas where dhole and domestic dog ranges overlap; vaccination buffers around protected areas reduce this risk. The species' persecution based on often inaccurate assessments of livestock predation risk represents an unjustified welfare harm that education and evidence-based coexistence programmes can address.