More or less wild dogs

One of the first things in the park I was taken to was a wild dog boma. Boma means a corral, or an enclosure, and the word is used throughout Africa mostly in matters connected to livestock herding; shepherds keep their animals in bomas during the night, to protect them from wild predators. So how come a boma is suddenly there to keep the wild predators in instead of out?

I believe that most of you readers are aware of the human-carnivore conflict occurring where (mainly) large carnivores still persist in the human populated areas (which is pretty much everywhere around the world). If you are not, let me briefly give you the mildest example. Imagine what happens when a pack of wolves, for instance (since you’re mostly European), shares its territory with two local sheep herders. Wolves will sooner or later come across this naïve herd either while in search for food or just during patrolling their area. With poor fencing (if any) around them and no human or dog guarding, the sheep are easy meal. But the wolves will not take only what they can fit in their stomach, they will usually add a bit more. It’s their instinct to kill and domesticated sheep simply don’t know why and how to run away (which they can’t anyway if they’re fenced). Shepherds lose their source of income, they ask compensation from the government and want the wolves to never come back. In short, wolves cause trouble and they pay with their heads for it.

In South Africa, the same problem occurs with the wild dogs. They should limited by the borders of the reserves and parks in which they’re kept but fences are not always enough  – dogs break out directly into the communal land, where cattle and goats are free-range, and for the same reason as European wolves, most often fall under rifle shots soon after. Luckily, parks care a lot about their dogs and as soon as the news about the escapees reaches them, responsible people rush to intervene and take the dogs back before bad things could happen. Such people work 24/7 and dedicate their lives to saving these wonderful carnivores from extinction (wild dogs are an endangered species with a decreasing population trend). Once back in the reserve, the bad dogs are locked up in a boma to stay away from trouble. Sometime it happens they escape again, but the electrical fence usually holds them in. After some weeks of rehabilitation, the dogs are translocated to another reserve, to make sure they will not misbehave in the same way again. There they meet more dogs with the same fate and all together can start living new lives and (hopefully) forget about the past.

Even I benefit from this “boma” practice. While the dogs are kept in the corral, they are feed according to a schedule and it’s easy to predict when their digestion will start working. So I wait there patiently with a plastic bag before it happens, collect fresh scats (poo) when it happens and take them to the freezer where they wait to be used for my experiments.