Painted dog conservation

Jo Taylor, from the Karingani Game Reserve in Mozambique talked to our young conservationists about Painted Dogs yesterday – as guest speaker in the second of this season’s PACE webinar series. Jo is a field ecology technician on Karingani Game Reserve in Mozambique. She manages wildlife monitoring across 150,000 ha of Karingani, a privately managed reserve, that is part of a vast conservation landscape that includes Kruger national park in eastern South Africa, and contiguous national parks and conservation areas in Mozambique and Zimbabwe. As wildlife habitats are increasingly encroached upon continuous conservation landscapes like these are vital for species that range long distances. We learned that despite such areas existing, part of Jo and her team’s conservation work involves carefully relocating Painted dogs from overpopulated to underpopulated areas, and has included reintroducing Painted dogs to countries where they had been completely wiped out.

Jo explained how Painted dogs live, their unique character, family dynamics, ecology, behaviours, their place and contribution in the ecosystem. The Question and Answer session was lengthy, we were amazed by the curiosity of participants, many were surprised to learn that Painted Dogs are a tourist attraction, and were reassured to discover that they are not wild and dangerous, but enchanting and a species we can allow to range freely without people being in any danger.

Again, we had groups join us from cities and rural areas, in central, east and southern Africa, many who were learning about a species for the first time. While many of us have become tired of working on-line so much, these webinars have shown the value that digital connectivity has for our partners in educational contexts: widening horizons, opening up new avenues of learning, access to experts, and in the case of the webinars, busting myths and misunderstandings about some less ‘popular’ wildlife species. We were thrilled that Trevor (below), who has been in a School Conservation club with Painted Dog Conservation in Zimbabwe, was able to share his experience and first hand knowledge of issues raised this week, with us at PACE, but more importantly with other young conservationists, in a city school in Douala, small towns and an urban education centre in Uganda, a village in coastal Kenya, in the Sahel, to Botswana and beyond. We are proud at PACE to be enabling our young Conservation Champions, giving them a platform to influence others!