Can we tell how big cats are doing by the number of wild dogs in the area?

[GuateGojira]

Like Pantherinae, I have always had serious doubts about the old records of tigers-lions been killed by wild dogs.

On the tiger side, from several accounts in literature, only two seems to be more or less from first hand and none of them present the age of the animals (one was a female, the other is unknown). In about 20 years in the field, Dr Karanth have NEVER saw a single incident of dholes attacking a tiger, not to say killing it, while he have saw many instances of tigers attacking, killing or driving away entire packs of dholes from kills, even a case of a tigress with her cubs. There is a clear domination of the tiger over the dhole in Nagarahole, Bandipur, Tadoba, all areas with high population of dholes, were packs can be over 15 members.

The famous stories of 30 dholes killing a tiger, and 10-15 dogs killed in the process seems stupid. What sense have to sacrifice your entire family just to kill a single animal that will bring you less food that a large deer????? In the words of Dr Karanth, this DON'T have ANY evolutionary sense.

I think that those stories of dholes killing tigers were just her-says and myths to enhance the reputation, or the create bad fame, to the dholes. In several places has been observed dholes attacking leopards, but interestingly, no dhole scat show leopard fur, but is true for the other way around. Somehow, the shy big cat do manage to kill one dog in some opportunity.

A more deep investigation will shed some light to this issue, showing that most of the dhole-tiger accounts in the old books are only copy-paste or rephrased of the same two stories presented by Sunquist & Sunquist (2002).

On the lion side, there is practically nothing to say, Schaller observed some isolated cases of dogs driving lions from kills, but not attacking or killing them. In other areas like South Africa, lions are a serious menace to wild dogs. Clearly lions dominate wild African dogs, period.
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