April 20th, 2009 
Sheila Simkin This morning game drive was filled with African wild dog sightings. At first, I thought…”oh, just more wild dogs”… and then Pat explained that wild dogs are extremely endangered and, again, we were fortunate to see so many of them. There were once around 500,000 African wild dogs roaming the continent in packs of 1,000 or more. Now there are approximately 3,000-5,500 left. The biggest populations are in Tanzania, Botswana and eastern Namibia with smaller packs in the Kruger National Park area.
The wild dog roams large territories and competes with lions and hyenas for the same prey with the exception that they hunt mostly by day. It appears that lions kill wild dogs for sport and don’t eat them. They are known as African wild, painted, or Cape hunting dogs and resemble wolves because of their pack-oriented social structure. At both sightings, we came across packs of adults and pups relaxing, playing and totally ignoring us. They looked skinny and half-starved to me but Pat said they are lean, mean fighting machines and always look like that.
The wild dogs have great large, rounded ears for excellent hearing, and hunt in packs. Wild dogs are wonderful hunters and actually catch their prey 70-90 percent of the time whereas the lazy lion only catches 30-40 percent of its prey. We had a new respect for these friendly (to each other) wild dogs after learning about them.
There were elephants all over Sabi Sand Game Reserve. The ever-popular elephant with it’s “fifth leg” exposed…View image…smaller, baby elephants…View image…and one elephant totally destroying and ripping trees out of the ground. A massive display of brute strength.
Beautiful and graceful giraffes…View image…birds, and too many other species to bore you with…
…and before you knew it, the 4 x 4′s were headed back to Chitwa Chitwa for breakfast, a rest, leisurely lunch in the shade (it gets very hot during the day), more rest and an evening game drive…
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