This image of a “Cape thous” comes from The Natural History of Dogs (1856) by Charles Hamilton Smith.
This book is a good historical record of how different wild dogs were classified. Dholes and dingoes were put together, probably because they were of the roughly the same color and many contended that domestic dogs were derived from dholes and dingoes.
The images in this book are particularly crude and somewhat imaginative. The artists probably didn’t have live specimens for references, or the artists who made them may have been rank amateurs.
The classification “thous” was commonly use for jackal. “Thous” is derived from the Classical Greek word for jackal (θώς), and Lorenz Oken the genus “Thos” for the jackals and the coyote.
This “Cape thous” is a depiction of a Cape black-backed jackal (Canis mesomelas mesomelas).
It resembles a live Cape jackal as much as Mickey Mouse resembles a house mouse.
