South Africa is filled with all kinds of animals. But how many of you have heard of this one,
the African wild dog, also known as the African painted dog,
because of its unique coat. You may have not heard of them because this species has
been seen as a pest to the region. So much so they've been hunted to near extinction.
But now conservationists are working towards building the packs biodiversity and ultimately saving the species.
This next film by director Emily Cross is called Part of the Pack.
Make sure to stick around after the credits to hear from the filmmaker herself.
The African wild dog is listed as an endangered species on the IUCN Red List.
It's the most endangered carnivore in South Africa.
A large part of the problem is the history and the perceptions that wild dogs carry.
There's only 550 wild dogs left in the whole country.
They live in family groups that are cooperating their hunting strategy.
They help each other, they protect each other.
There's this level of social structure and energy that really builds a pack and keeps the cohesion
within them. The more time you start spending with them, you start learning the different
personalities within the pack. The different roles and responsibilities that the pack members share.
That kind of emotional intelligence is something that really draws me to them.
The wild dog are the great hunters and they have a nice collaboration when they do their hunt, you get a
particular individual that is right by the prey. And when that particular individual tires out,
he pulls off to the edge of the line and the others come in so that they keep that
persistent pace. And then the youngsters also help the pack to hunt and have to feed the puppies
during the training season. Whatever they've killed, they would eat something, swallow it,
they would run kilometers back to the den and regurgitate for the puppies.
I think it's a very unique system, especially in the African bush where they've got a million
other challenges, but they'll put their pack members first. There's so many different
threats and a real history of persecution to the African wild dogs. They were seen as vermin,
people were receiving financial rewards for killing wild dogs and South Africa.
Wild dog territory was completely reduced right across the country. So it kind of shows
the kind of urgency we have to conserve the species.
The main problem would be human beings.
The snares are being put in a place that you can't really get to patrol every day.
And even outside the park, then it's like 15 to 20 snares in a kilometer radius. So whatsoever,
the animal is just running through without anticipating anything. And all of a sudden this
thing catches it, you actually most likely to lose the entire pack f they go through a snared area.
We've had cases where a lot of dogs been snared, and it's been removed from the pack and placed
in captivity for rehabilitation. And often that wild dog does quite fine with getting rehabbed
and then suddenly takes a turn for the worse a few days later.
And in post mortems, we find that the severity of stress being away from the pack,
and even something that we nicknamed broken heart syndrome,
are things that wild dogs really do suffer from. And without the pack, and without that cohesion,
it's a big struggle for them. They've existed this long, because they live and die for their pack.
Wild dogs disperse to find new territories and to start packs of their own.
It's an adaption that ensures genetic variability. But the problem with this
is that they are adapted to traveling very far distances. This causes breakouts out of the park,
a dog running 20 kilometers in a space of two hours,
getting to understand how far they could actually extend in search for partners.
So often forestry communities, commercial farm lands and highways,
and in doing that, they'll end up often becoming roadkill too.
And if they encounter communities, they kind of find a way of actually avoiding it
Should we just be saying: Let's open up passages for them to actually move through,
so that they can be able to find the chance to live in some other places? Or if they do find
a suitable land, then they would settle there.
The two main objectives that we have within conserving wild dogs in South Africa
and in southern Africa, in fact. Number one, maintain what we have. And number two, restore
what we've lost. That in itself even includes the genetic translocations between the reserves.
Simply putting wild dogs in one reserve and thinking we've done our job is not
the case. Once those pups are born within that pack, and they start wanting to breed,
we have to ensure that they are breeding with wild dogs that are far related from them.
We want to increase the population numbers, which includes the pack numbers
and the individual numbers, and also increase the genetic diversity within the wild dogs. The more
dogs fitted with tracking collars, the better for the wild dog population of South Africa.
collars need to be under a certain weight in order to be fitted onto a wild dog...
programmed to log four points a day. This gives us consistent data throughout
the time of the collar being on the animal. Information on habitat utilization, population,
demographics, poaching and snaring incidents, as well as potential breakouts out of the park.
We can then use that database within the country to carry up the best dogs
and ensure that the best genetics are coming through and increasing the genetic diversity.
Educating from grassroots level from the kids up,
and getting them to know about wild dogs and grow a love and a passion for wild dogs.
Educational, in a way, the community starts learning how
these animals aren't as dangerous as we thought they were.
So just the fact that a wild dog has the ability to choose a den and then ensure that the sick,
the injured and the young, are fed first and looked after, and that the fittest dogs will eat at the end,
for me says everything we need to know about wild dogs. And in fact,
it's something that I think as humans, we almost need to take a page out of their book.
That pack formation teaches you something and you hope you will see families live like that,
you would hope you would see communities coming together. And surely, as we are putting efforts
into conserving the species, if we get community buy ins and local farmers buying in, it will
actually be formalizing a greater pack system that we've actually observed from these creatures. And
in that extent, we'll be having at least a combined society towards conservation.
When you change the mindset and the perceptions,
then you get to a point of saying hey, I've done something.
We've got hope.
Now let's talk to Emily cross about how she fell in love with these painted creatures.
So my name is Emily Cross, and I'm a conservation wildlife filmmaker
as well as a full time production manager in the advertising world in Durban, South Africa.
It started actually in 2015, I went to a Game Reserve in Zululand into the land called Mkuze and
I would go there once a year with my family. And it's actually a funny story. I started speaking
with this Wildlife ACT monitor who is there to monitor endangered species and they mentioned
how they were they monitoring the leopards and the wild dogs and I'd never heard of wild dogs before.
And she said, you know actually if you like go down this road at this time, like
just turn off your car and just wait You might see them. We jump in the car and we go
I'll never forget it, like we turn the corner there was just grass. And literally, there was nothing.
So we turn the car off, and we wait. Just short, short grass, and there's absolutely nothing.
So we talking, talking and then all of a sudden you start seeing these white flicks
through the grass. And we had no idea what these things were kind of thing. And next thing
like 30 wild dogs got up out of the grass, like where we couldn't see them at all before
and they got up. And we're able to watch them for about 40 minutes, which is also super rare. First
that pack size. And then like the duration of the moment that we had was just incredible. And we saw
them playing with snakes and like, like just as a pack interacting with each other. And I just,
I just remember like having this like sudden rush that like this is like something magical.
like as if I was seeing a unicorn like I'd never seen this creature before.
I'm a big fan of dogs in general. So like this was just such an incredible experience.
I was working at a preschool. But there was just something about this animal species that
just wouldn't get off of me kind of thing. Like I just was constantly thinking about
them and asking questions. And one day, it was a sponsored ad on Facebook and they came up that there was
a pitch competition, a new pitch. And never heard of it, never done anything to do with filmmaking.
But it was you know, enter your story to do with nature, environmental wildlife filmmaking,
and you can get go to the final round, you can pitch it and you could win 50,000 rand to
create your short story. So I remember like it was about a week's worth of time I was like,
like, should I do it? Don't I do it? I have no idea about this like,
so I went to my dad. And I explained to him that I want to try to do this kind of thing. And
like this is the story I want to tell, no one knows about these animals this like 500 left.
We need to do it. And so I sent off my proposal. And I remember,
I just... to be honest, I completely forgot about it. And I thought that nothing was going to come
from it. And I left it. And then, I was once having a nap in the afternoon and I got a phone call
and it was Noel from NEWF. And I just remember like I remember been completely shocked. And
he was saying like you've made it like your pitch finalists. And I was like it's not like this, I remember like
stopping and looking at the numbers to make sure that was a legit number and everything and
Noel being Noel just like cracked up laughing and was like, we'll you certain kind of thing.
And from there, the ball started rolling.
There was first the first hurdle was public speaking
and pitching. Like it was one thing making a pretty proposal and convincing people with words,
but to now pitch in front of like a room of people from Jackson Wild and from Nat Geo.
It's extremely intimidating. And so that was the first hurdle. But it was actually such an
amazing experience and I actually won the Audience Award from my pitch, which was such a huge surprise.
From my understanding of what I've seen, especially with South Africa's dogs,
and in [inaudible] dogs, the bloodlines are getting so strong and so
good that they are now being dispersed to other areas and other countries and stuff
to try and get the numbers up there. So there is definitely improvements happening. And I think
they've got the right people in the right roles, doing the right things.
I love my job and I love producing and I would never change the career path. But
there's something that while making "Part of the Pack", I just got a taste of the conservation and wildlife
world. And it's definitely where I want to end up. At the moment I'm busy transitioning
into seeing what opportunities they're might be that open to that. But I've since literally
the second the film was edited, I was like, Okay, this needs to be a feature. So at the moment, I've
got a feature proposal, it's just at the moment, finding the right funders and applying for it. So
I've just applied to a really cool film grant called the Durban FilmMart grant. And, and so holding thumbs that
that hopefully bring something but I think I've sort of convinced myself that in the next like
three years, I want to say, it I don't have the funding, I'm just gonna find a way to do it.
Without that kind of thing. Like I've got enough footage and that it is more wanting to spend the
time the communities, telling those stories and finding there were more individuals that I
wanted to interview and involve like vets and more hands on people that are involved in the process.
Thanks for joining us again for Seeker Indie, our new short documentary spotlight series.
We're excited to keep bringing you stories from science you may have never heard before.
Keep coming back to see what else we have in store and the amazing
stories we continue to highlight. Thanks for watching and we'll see you next time on Seeker.