Of dholes and tigers: Asiatic wild dog has a run-in with a big cat in India
In a video posted early this year that’s recently been making the rounds on social media, two of India’s preeminent carnivores – one a big, burly, world-famous beast, the other smaller, slighter, and far less celebrated – engage in a tense faceoff.
The run-in between a Bengal tiger and a dhole, or Asiatic wild dog, took place in Nagarahole National Park in the southwestern Indian state of Karnataka, in the foothills of the Western Ghats. The clip shows the big cat briefly chasing the dhole along a forest road. The tiger then advances at a walk upon the dog, which bounds and wheels about issuing wild (and hair-raising) cackling yaps and yowls.
Dholes are mid-sized canids – bigger than jackals, smaller than wolves – with rusty coats and dark-tipped tails. Besides Asiatic (or Indian) wild dogs, they’re known by several other common names, including “red dog” and “whistling dog,” the latter a reference to the unique vocalisations pack members use to stay in contact while pursuing chital, sambar, wild pigs, and other quarry through thick forest and jungle.
The footage, posted by FiveZero Safaris, was taken by a guide on one of the company’s Black Leopard Safaris, an outing that seeks Nagarahole’s melanistic, or black-coated, Indian leopards: the magnificent, inky “black panthers” made famous in the form of Bagheera in Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book.
FiveZero’s Kurt Jay Bertels told me the guide didn’t believe there were any pups in the area during the encounter, or indeed any other dholes, and that the canid was likely just issuing a general warning call about the tiger’s presence. “When it comes to a smaller animal seeing a potentially dangerous animal,” he wrote, “they seldom just run away – the theory being that it’s a lot better to see a predator, because then you know where it is.”
Wildlife biologist Arjun Srivathsa focuses on dholes for his PhD research at the University of Florida and is a member of the IUCN Species Survival Commission Canid Specialist Group and the IUCN Dhole Working Group as well as a research associate with Wildlife Conservation Society – India. He told me he’d seen the Nagarahole tiger/dhole footage when it was first posted in January. “My first guess was that the dhole was luring the tiger away from a den (with or without pups),” he wrote by email. “I have seen jackals do this before. But this is speculation of course. It seems plausible because dholes (as far as current knowledge goes) litter in November to December and the pups stay in dens for two to 2.5 months.”
He added, “There’s also a possibility that the dhole was just harassing the tiger. I have seen videos of dholes doing that to sloth bears, leopards, and elephants. But I’d expect the full pack to partake in such an activity.”