Dholes are highly social, endangered Asian wild dogs whose welfare in captivity depends entirely on appropriate pack management and naturalistic enclosure design.
Dholes represent a significant gap in zoo welfare science: they are endangered, socially complex, and rarely kept in facilities with the specialist knowledge their needs demand. Pack integrity is fundamental; disruption through transfers, introductions, or separation causes the same cascading social instability seen in painted dogs. Enclosure design must accommodate their active, wide-ranging lifestyle through large areas with terrain variety. Their cooperative hunting behaviour can be partially engaged through complex feeding enrichment requiring group coordination. The relative rarity of dholes in captivity means that husbandry expertise is concentrated in a small number of institutions; knowledge-sharing within the SSP network is critical for maintaining welfare standards across facilities.