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SNARING
The Wild dog is one of Africa’s most endangered carnivores. Zambia is one of six countries with viable populations of this species, with the largest populations centered in the Luangwa Valley and Greater Kafue ecosystems.
One threat to African wild dog survival is the illegal bushmeat trade. One of the main methods of bushmeat poaching is the use of wire snares. Snaring depletes wild dog prey and wild dogs that get accidentally caught in snares are injured and sometimes die. In the Luangwa valley ZCP has a long-standing collaboration with Conservation South Luangwa and the Department of National Parks and Wildlife to combat snaring and reduce its impacts on large carnivores such as African wild dog and lion. In episode one of Wild Dogs: Running With the Pack, the team from ZCP and Julz search for and remove snares.
HISTORY OF THE MANZI PACK
In Wild Dogs: Pack Vs Pride Julz reunites with the Manzi pack which has been under the watchful eye of ZCP since their formation in 2013. Unfortunately, at the end of 2018 the pack lost its alpha male and did not den in 2019. The pack never found a replacement alpha male and later that year the pack also lost the alpha female to conflict with a lion pride.
But the Manzi pack bounced back. The Manzi males inherited the home range of their pack and together with the new alpha female, they reared their first litter of 8 pups. By 2020 male and female dogs that left the Manzi pack had successfully positioned themselves as alphas in packs of their own. They were responsible for more than 50% of the recorded pups in the Luangwa Valley.
In this second series of ‘Wild Dogs : Pack vs Pride,’ Wildlife filmmaker, Julz Braatvedt returns to Zambia’s South Luangwa National Park to follow the fortunes of two very different dog Packs – the mighty Manzi, and the tiny, but fearless, Kakumbi dogs. The pups Julz filmed last year are now yearlings, who now have to step up and protect their family. But this year the dog packs are under huge pressure from an increasing number of lions in their territory. He's once again joined by the dedicated team from the Zambian Carnivore Program’s Luangwa Valley Project. One of the largest and longest-running field-based carnivore conservation projects on the African continent.The ZCP teams log over 4,000 person days per year, working in the bush intensively monitoring nearly 1,000 individual wild dogs, lions, cheetahs, and spotted hyenas as part of their comprehensive science-based conservation work.
