He said it was possible that the wild dogs had some degree of natural immunity to the rabies virus, and that darting the wild dogs with anaesthetic and handling them, either to take blood samples from them, to vaccinate them, or to put radio collars on them, was extremely stressful to the animals. In correspondence published in Nature in 1992, Burrows wrote that the blood serum of some of the African wild dogs ( Lycaon pictus) had shown rabies antibodies, suggesting they had been exposed to the rabies virus at some point.
#Hyenas vs wild dogs series#
In the debates that followed, one hypothesis became particularly controversial: in a series of papers, Roger Burrows, a researcher from the University of Exeter, U.K., contended that the “handling” of Serengeti’s wild dogs by researchers had led to the animals’ deaths. In 1991, all of the African wild dogs that previously lived in Serengeti National Park in Tanzania completely disappeared. The study’s authors posit that African wild dogs went missing from the Serengeti plains because of increasing competition with lions and hyenas, whose numbers have increased in the park.