Three Wild Dogs Made a Record-Breaking Trek Across Zambia, Traveling More Than 2,500 Miles in Search of Mates

The canines achieved the longest recorded movement by any African mammal. Their journey highlights the importance of having protected corridors for wildlife

Sara Hashemi | Daily Correspondent

September 16, 2026 11:47 a.m.

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Three male African wild dogs braved predators, rivers and traps to journey a record-breaking 2,500 miles across the continent—the longest movement ever recorded by an African mammal.

Their nine-month trek, described in the journal Ecology on September 13, reveals both the threats that these animals face and their resilience in the face of them.

“It’s a fantastic story,” says Sarah Durant, a conservation scientist at the Zoological Society of London who was not involved with the study, to Phie Jacobs at Science. “It really adds to what we know about African wild dogs, but also the connectivity of these landscapes.”

African wild dogs (Lycaon pictus) are an endangered species, with only about 6,600 adults and yearlings remaining in the wild. They live in highly social pack families, but only the dominant female and male dogs breed within the pack. So, the other members either wait to become dominant, or they disperse in search of a mate that they can breed with more immediately.

Scientists attached radio collars to wild dogs from 19 groups, allowing them to paint a picture of the canines’ movements across the continent. The trio of brothers at the center of the study, known as the Mayukuyuku males, started its journey in mid-summer 2025, when the dogs left their home in Zambia’s Kafue National Park and headed eastward into unprotected areas. Just two weeks earlier, four of their sisters had started their own trek, exploring a game management area near their home range. But the females’ numbers were quickly reduced to three.

In September 2025, the siblings briefly reunited in an unprotected area, after the females had traveled 872 miles and the males had traveled nearly 750 miles. Wild dogs, per the paper, have a remarkable ability to locate one another by scent. The next day, though, the two groups separated again, and the females arrived in a small, forested spot a few weeks later.

That’s where their journey would be cut short. One female from the group was collared, and her tracking data showed that she was repeatedly moving back and forth, revisiting the same location. This is an unusual pattern for wild dogs that’s typically only seen when they have a newborn pup that can’t yet move with the group, or when they’re returning to an injured packmate—wild dogs are extremely reluctant to abandon their injured. The researchers believe one of the packmates was killed by a hunting snare, and the collared female likely suffered a similar fate.

All the while, the male dogs continued their journey. By April 2026, they had traveled more than 2,560 miles and ultimately reached a game management area in eastern Zambia’s Luangwa Valley. “We think they’ve actually established a [territorial] range, but we haven’t quantified who they’re with and how many dogs there are,” study co-author Matthew Becker, chief executive of the Zambian Carnivore Program, explains to Ryan Truscott at Mongabay.

This isn’t the first time that wild dogs have embarked on a remarkable odyssey. In 2021, three sisters from Zambia’s South Luangwa National Park traveled nearly 1,300 miles across the continent, moving through Zambia and parts of Mozambique.

These journeys suggest that African wild dog populations are more connected than previously thought, and they offer a stark reminder of the importance of connected landscapes for conservation. “We can’t see these protected areas as islands and expect them to be functional in the long term; we need to think much broader than that,” says Bruce Ellender, a study co-author and a conservation director at the Nature Conservancy in Zambia, to Helen Briggs at BBC News.

Nyambe Nyambe, the executive director of the Kavango Zambezi Transfrontier Conservation Area Secretariat, echoes that sentiment to Science. The study shows that governments need to protect the wildlife corridors that connect important ecosystems, such as by working to mitigate conflicts with hunters, says Nyambe, who wasn’t involved in the research.

“Borders should not define us in this kind of work,” he tells the outlet. “If the landscape is fragmented, perhaps the future is even more fragmented.”

Sara Hashemi is a science writer and fact-checker currently based in New York City. Her work has appeared in Sierra, The Body, Maisonneuve magazine and more.