Understanding the welfare and conservation challenges facing African wild dogs — the continent's most endangered large carnivore — and the integrated approaches that protect both individual dogs and population viability.
African wild dog welfare is inseparable from their conservation status — a species at 6,600 individuals with fragmented populations faces welfare threats at both individual and population scales. Disease from domestic dog contact, persecution by livestock farmers who perceive wild dogs as a threat, vehicle strikes near roads crossing their territories, and snaring in bushmeat traps all cause individual welfare harm. The cooperative social structure of wild dogs means that individual deaths — particularly of breeding adults or experienced hunters — have welfare impacts that cascade through pack members who lose social partners and, in the case of alpha loss, may face pack dissolution. Conservation interventions that protect individual dogs are simultaneously welfare and conservation actions.