Africa's Painted Dog

When I was a girl, I remember watching a television program about the wild dogs of Africa.  They were beautiful to look at but lived such a hard life.  They never knew where the next meal was coming from nor were their pups safe from predators. I cried as my favorite pup struggled to survive.

 

Females leave their packs as young as 14-30 months and will join a pack that lacks sexually mature females so that a male will help raise the pups. The females will compete for the strongest male in the pack. Sounds a bit like what women do now, but that is my opinion.  On the other hand, males generally never leave the pack to which they were born.   

But don't let their cute little faces fool you.  These dogs are wild and could literally rip you a new one with a bite force quotient of 142 of all the carnivores except the Tasmanian Devil.  There is so much more information about these dogs on the web that I cannot begin to write all there is to know about them.  Click on the link above and it will help you to get a small bit of facts regarding these animals. 

Here is a video that was taken at the London Zoo.  Sorry but no killing of animals involved in this video.