"Wild Dog Diaries" - by Brendan Whittington-Jones (EWT)

One may not believe it, but trying to conserve Wild Dogs can be a bit like being a Marmite salesperson. I’ll admit the products don’t look particularly similar. Wild Dogs run considerably faster than Marmite (when was the last time you saw a jar of Marmite running at 60km/h?) and sometimes Marmite can have the better aroma, but one common element persists; opinion about whether to like the product or not is almost always polarised.

The recent Imfolozi Mountain Bike Challenge hosted by Hluhluwe-Imfolozi Park was a great example of Wild Dog-induced pleasure and additional motivation for all of us as Wild Dog conservationists to persist with management and range-expansion efforts...

"Wild Dog Diaries" - by Brendan Whittington-Jones (EWT)

At times I wish Wild Dog packs had home range sizes like those of a slightly less vibrant and less nomadic species; perhaps the humble earthworm. With the exception of food requirements it would make management of the species a bit simpler. Earthworms appear to just slide around in the earth, processing organics for the benefit those who happen to grow above them. Now I’m sure there is some politics below the surface we aren’t privy to, but it certainly appears quite a sedate existence if they avoid prying birds, spades, the occasional rogue mole and don’t go swimming on wet roads. The urge to travel vast distances in anything other than a millennium also seems quite restricted; unless Disney gets hold of them at which point an underachieving but heroic earthworm will speak many languages and save his community when disaster seems imminent. But I digress slightly.

"Wild Dog Diaries" - Brendan Whittington-Jones (EWT)

Upon hearing that Wild Dogs are endangered, I often get the question “well why don’t you just breed them in captivity?” usually followed by the chaser, “that’ll sort out your problem”. There are many of us who wish conservation of Wild Dogs was that simple and that we could sit smugly, victorious cold brew in hand, basking in the knowledge that we’d so easily saved a species from extinction.

This solution however implies that Wild Dogs are reproductively challenged (to be polite). This is an affliction that definitely doesn’t apply to Wild Dogs. They’re smooth operators.

Can a Game Ranger order venison steak? - Jon Morgan

I was out at Orange, a great restaurant in Nelspruit, this last weekend and happily ordered a Venison steak to eat. One of the ladies with us asked me how I could eat a wild animal especially as I am a Game Ranger. She couldn't understand how I could look at the animals during the day and then order one for dinner.

Rhino dung, Snatch, Ego’s and Fences

So I know I said we would discuss what we have been up to and why, so here is a slight angle on the WWF Black Rhino Range Expansion Project which Wildlife ACT helped with at the end of last year. A couple of our conservation volunteers were there helping out, the most noticeable volunteer task being that of designated dung collector - which required a hand to be shoved up a tranquilised rhinos’ bums to get dung samples. However, this post has little to do with dirty hands, rhino dung or tracking rhino. One of the components of the project is to encourage neighbours to drop fences to accommodate Black Rhino. A question I wanna throw out there is the following:

Why do so many game reserves still have fences up between one another anyway?

Wildlife ACT gets Blogging!

Wildlife ACT gets blogging! We decided this would be an awesome format for us to communicate to the world on what we have been up to and more importantly why we have been up to what we have been up to and how went about it and what other conservationists think about what we have been up to...