How far do African wild dogs travel? Three brothers walked 4,126 km across Zambia

Published September 28, 2026

Dispersing African wild dogs, young adults leaving their birth pack to breed elsewhere, can cover thousands of kilometers. In the longest wild dog dispersal on record, three brothers who left the Mayukuyuku Pack in Zambia's Kafue National Park in mid-2025 had moved 4,126 km (about 2,560 miles) by April 1, 2026, and settled in the Luano Game Management Area, according to a study published in Ecology on September 13, 2026. Their sisters fared worse: near the city of Kabwe, one was probably snared and another died, probably in a snare too; contact with the third was lost.

The record comes from an open-access paper by Scott Creel of Montana State University and 27 co-authors, among them researchers from the Zambian Carnivore Programme and Zambia's Department of National Parks and Wildlife: "Extraordinary movements connecting distant ecosystems by African wild dogs (Lycaon pictus)". One dog in each of the two Mayukuyuku groups wore a GPS collar, Mongabay reported on September 16, 2026. Unless marked as straight-line, the distances below are path lengths: every leg the dogs walked, added up, not the gap between start and finish.

How far do African wild dogs normally travel?

Far enough that even a large reserve can be too small for them. The current IUCN Red List assessment, from 2025, says resident packs hold much bigger home ranges than their energy needs would predict, which the assessors link to competition with lions and spotted hyenas. A viable population typically needs at least about 10,000 square kilometers, and wide ranging often carries packs to the edges of nominally protected land, where people are.

The 2012 assessment, republished in 2020 and since replaced, did the geometry: no spot inside a 5,000 square kilometer reserve lies more than 40 km from the boundary, well within a pack's everyday ranging. To a wild dog, even a reserve that large has no true interior.

According to the Ecology paper, dispersal works on another scale: several Zambian groups have covered roughly 2,000 km or more since a female called EWD-1355 made her long journey in 2021 and 2022, the longest of them 4,126 km.

Who were the Mayukuyuku dogs?

Seven 3-year-olds from one cohort of the Mayukuyuku Pack in Kafue National Park, a cohort in which, according to the paper, 19 pups had lived to adulthood. That meant large same-sex groups with little chance of breeding at home. In July 2025 four of the females left; two weeks later three of the males followed. Given the pack's makeup, the authors write, the departures were expected.

What route did the brothers take?

The sisters spent their first weeks in the Lunga Lushwishi Game Management Area, a buffer zone next to their home range. The brothers went east into unprotected land. The authors describe central Zambia's human footprint as fairly high and widely spread, so no one obvious route leads from Kafue to the protected areas farther east.

Cities turned the dogs around. Both groups reached the edges of major cities, among them Kabwe, Kitwe and Ndola (288,598, 665,961 and 627,503 residents), and each time doubled back. After pushing north as far as Ndola, the brothers retraced their outbound track almost step for step for 200 km.

On September 18 and 19, 2025, in unprotected country 72 km from Kitwe and 78 km from Ndola, the brothers met their sisters again, after the females had walked 1,404 km and the males 1,203 km. Wild dogs track each other well by scent, but this time they found the wrong dogs: as Mongabay noted, they were siblings. The groups split after a day.

The brothers turned south, avoiding the Great North Road between Lusaka, a capital of 2.2 million people, and the Copperbelt. They passed Kabwe on its east side this time, skirted two large reservoirs that cannot be crossed for 20 to 30 km, and on November 9 reached the Chisomo and Petauke Game Management Areas, part of the Luangwa Valley Ecosystem and home to one of Africa's biggest and densest wild dog populations.

Five days later the brothers were within 14 km of four females that had left the Kasweta Pack in South Luangwa National Park. Over six days the two groups' paths passed within 1.6 km of each other; the Kasweta females had walked 1,538 km and the brothers 2,356 km, from birth ranges 546 km apart in a straight line. The groups did not stay together. The brothers moved 107 km southwest into unprotected land, and by April 1, 2026 they had logged 4,126 km and settled in a new range in the Luano Game Management Area, at the top of the Great Rift escarpment.

What happened to their sisters?

Soon after leaving, the four sisters had become three; the paper does not say why. After the reunion they headed south, and on October 10, 2025, with 1,899 km behind them, they reached a small patch of forest near Kabwe.

There the collared female began moving back and forth to one fixed spot. Wild dogs rarely do that except to return to newborn pups or an injured packmate, and a snared dog cannot move until the wire breaks. After a week of these trips, in an area with many active snares, the researchers inferred that one of the uncollared sisters had been caught. On October 23 the collared female died too, probably in a snare; someone had cut her collar off with a knife. Contact with the third sister was lost.

It had happened before. In October 2021, EWD-1355, then 3 years old, left the Luamfwa pack in South Luangwa National Park with two littermate sisters. Together they covered more than 2,300 km, into Mozambique and back. In Lower Zambezi National Park, on the Zimbabwe border, they reached the range of a large pack but did not join it, and none of its males left with them. EWD-1355 was killed in June 2022 by a wire snare that bushmeat hunters had set. Her sisters' fate is unknown.

Is 4,126 km the longest wild dog journey on record?

Yes. Mongabay calls it the longest recorded wild dog dispersal, and the paper cites nothing longer. By the authors' account, the previous record was a 3,892 km movement (about 2,420 miles) that began at Loliondo, in the Serengeti ecosystem, and ended at Tsavo West National Park, with EWD-1355's journey second.

That 3,892 km path ended 520 km in a straight line from where it began. Among the Zambian groups that dispersed after EWD-1355, the largest straight-line distance was 419 km (about 260 miles), roughly a tenth of the longest path. A route that doubles back at every city adds distance without adding ground.

The authors offer an American yardstick: Interstate 90 crosses the United States in 4,860 km (about 3,020 miles), so the brothers' path was about 85 percent of it.

Why do African wild dogs leave their pack?

Because a subordinate that stays seldom gets to breed. In a typical pack only one dominant animal of each sex breeds; subordinates can wait for a chance at the top while helping raise their relatives, or leave to breed sooner. The 2025 IUCN assessment adds that wild dogs strongly avoid inbreeding and very rarely join a pack they were not born into, so most young dogs must leave to find unrelated mates.

According to the paper, dogs most often leave at 2 or 3, and are likeliest to go when a big group of same-sex agemates matures together and every packmate of the other sex is close kin. Large dispersing groups are more likely to take over an existing pack by evicting its same-sex residents, and they have tended to out-hunt small ones, an advantage the authors say human depletion of prey is now changing.

Creel put the dilemma plainly to Mongabay: "A good way to die, if you're an African wild dog, is to leave your pack." Staying, he added, is a good way never to reproduce.

How do wild dogs get past farms, roads and towns?

The authors argue that wild dogs cope with hostile ground because they evolved to move around stronger rivals, lions and spotted hyenas. Under their competition-movement-connectivity hypothesis, the habits that get wild dogs through lion country also work on land people have made unfavorable. Earlier GPS work fits: outside protected areas, collared dogs move with a mean speed 1.7 times higher and a mean turning angle 2.4 times smaller than inside them, much as they do after meeting lions.

The Luamfwa sisters show what that looks like: they climbed up and down the Rift Valley wall more than once, crossed big rivers and highways, moved fast through unprotected land, and rested in rocky spots or small woodland patches where they were less likely to meet people. None of that helps against a hidden wire loop.

Why is a long journey not the same as connectivity?

The Mayukuyuku brothers and sisters, the Luamfwa females and the Kasweta females moved 9,863 km between them, yet by the authors' assessment those four journeys produced little demographic or genetic connectivity, meaning dispersers joining another population and passing on their genes there.

The obstacle is social: when unfamiliar wild dogs meet, the usual result is a fight, often a lethal one, which is why the authors call immigration risky and frequently a failure. Researchers increasingly treat dispersal as movement shaped by vegetation, roads and settlements. The authors call that view valuable but add that dispersal is "fundamentally a social process": dispersers are looking for other wild dogs, and social and demographic conditions that push dogs out of one pack and let them into another help drive connection between populations.

Even so, the authors' recorded movements between seven Zambian national parks match genetic evidence that wild dogs can still connect distant ecosystems. Observed movements tie together every major Zambian population, reach into Mozambique, and come within a few kilometers of Angola, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Malawi and Zimbabwe. The authors consider it a plausible hypothesis that most populations across eastern and southern Africa are still linked.

What is a Game Management Area?

A Game Management Area, or GMA, is Zambian land declared for the sustainable use of wildlife, where people may live and hunting needs a license, permit or concession. Under the Zambia Wildlife Act, 2015, as enacted, the President declares a GMA by statutory order after consulting the minister and the local community (section 28), and hunting without a hunting license, capture permit or hunting concession is an offense (section 31).

National parks are stricter: entering or living in one, except as the Act allows, is itself an offense. The Ecology paper ranks the tiers: GMAs are less protected than national parks, and Forest Reserves less protected still. The authors put the share of Zambia under some form of wildlife protection at 40 percent, and say some important corridors, notably along the Luangwa Valley, are protected while others are not.

Bruce Ellender, a Zambia-based conservation director for The Nature Conservancy and a co-author, said in a statement reported by Mongabay that some GMAs are being rapidly degraded: in those around Kafue National Park, half the land has been converted to farming. If that goes unchecked, he said, the chance to keep these ecosystems connected will be lost within a decade. Our page on habitat loss covers that kind of slow loss.

Why are snares so deadly for dispersing wild dogs?

Wild dogs evolved to avoid lions, not wire. A snare on a path through vegetation, the paper notes, is easy to hide, silent, nearly scentless and unlike any natural hazard, so large carnivores do not avoid one, except perhaps those that survived an earlier snaring. Even that is doubtful: some dogs have been caught up to four times. Because wild dogs are so reluctant to abandon a snared packmate, several are often caught in one event.

In the authors' account, bushmeat snaring now hits wild dogs and other big predators hard and widely, in three ways: the wire kills them, the hunting thins out their prey, and the balance among carnivore species shifts. Leaving a well-protected national park raises the risk, which puts dispersers most in harm's way. The 2025 IUCN assessment describes wild dogs as frequent by-catch in snares set for antelope and other wild ungulates, and says the resulting deaths can be enough to drive populations down. It is the land version of what our page on bycatch describes in the water: the animal that was never the target.

Mongabay reported two figures that are not in the paper: the Zambian Carnivore Programme has tracked 19 dispersing groups over the past decade and a half, and half of them ended with snare deaths. In Mongabay's report, Creel named snaring, both the prey it strips out and the dogs it kills, as the single problem to focus on for wild dog conservation across the continent.

How many African wild dogs are left?

Fewer than 700 packs, by the current IUCN estimate. The 2025 assessment, by R. Woodroffe, T. McNutt, R. Groom and D. Ngatia, keeps Lycaon pictus at Endangered, a category it has held since 1990, now under criterion C2b: a small population with extreme fluctuations. It puts mature individuals at 1,676, estimates a decline of about 17 percent over three generations (15 years), and gives the trend as decreasing.

That total tops the 2012 figure of 1,409, but the assessors attribute the rise to newly found subpopulations, in Angola and the Central African Republic, and a revised method, not to real growth. Dated June 10, 2025, the assessment replaced the 2012 one and its 2020 amended version. Our guide to reading an IUCN assessment explains why the date matters as much as the category.

The 2025 assessors call habitat loss the overarching threat: it shrinks the space wild dogs can use and exposes them to snares, traffic, hostile farmers and domestic dogs that can carry fatal diseases. Endangered is one of the three categories this catalog covers, as what "in crisis" means explains, and the African wild dog dossier records the species under it.

What do the researchers want done?

Their first answer is corridors: the authors want the links between stronghold populations protected, calling that a high priority for wild dog conservation. They also expect that if government and NGO investment in Zambia's protected areas grows wildlife numbers, more animals are likely to disperse outward, bringing more connectivity and more conflict with people; the authors argue for policies that anticipate both.

Key facts and dates

• October 2021 to June 2022: EWD-1355 travels more than 2,300 km before dying in a wire snare.
• July 2025: four females leave the Mayukuyuku Pack in Kafue National Park; three males follow two weeks later.
• October 23, 2025: the collared sister dies near Kabwe, probably in a snare.
• April 1, 2026: the brothers have moved 4,126 km and settled in the Luano Game Management Area.
• September 13, 2026: the study is published online in Ecology.