Lilly the golden retriever has been enlisted to raise some African wild dog pups that were born at the Oklahoma City Zoo.
Despite their unfortunate name, African wild dogs are not feral dogs. They are a critically endangered pack-hunting canid that is closely related to domestic dogs, wolves, and jackals.
The African wild dog bitch that had these pups was too nervous to care for them properly, and the zoo staff decided to use a domestic bitch as a surrogate.
Lilly’s biological pup is definitely going to have some interesting adventures with her littermates. Lilly is a search-and-rescue dog, and her puppy is going to trained for that exact same task.
But for right now, she’s a playmate for some really exotic foster siblings.
What is the age difference?
I don’t know. AWD are born a lot smaller than similarly sized domestic dogs, and they have the largest litter of the pack-hunting canids– because everything in Africa hunts them, leopards, lions, hyenas, etc.
Very interesting about their size and reason for it. Thank you. I will research them later tonight.
Wonderful! I will do more research on African Wild Dogs. Sounds like the genetic Village dog but I’ll learn about that. Great pics. Thank you!
generic :-P
Very interested to see what, if any, effect the Golden adoptive parent has on the wild dog pups.
This is a good use of our best friend to protect endangered natural heritage. Long live the canids.
Beautiful mamma