Three Wild Dogs Walked 4,126 Kilometers Across Zambia, the Longest Journey Ever Recorded for a Land Mammal in Africa. Most of Their Sisters Died in Poachers' Snares Along the Way.

Three young male African wild dogs fitted with tracking collars in Zambia's Kafue National Park covered 4,126 kilometers, about 2,564 miles, before settling in the Luano Game Management Area of the Luangwa Valley, the longest journey ever recorded for any land mammal on the African continent. The trek, documented by researchers from the Zambian Carnivore Programme and Montana State University and published in the journal Ecology, is roughly the distance from New York to Los Angeles, made on foot through farmland, highways and human settlements by an animal that weighs about 25 kilograms.

African wild dogs, Lycaon pictus, are endangered, with only a few thousand left in scattered populations. Young adults routinely leave their birth packs in same-sex groups to search for unrelated mates and new territory, and those dispersal journeys are how isolated populations stay genetically connected. The team, led by Montana State ecologist Scott Creel, collared dogs before they dispersed and followed their location fixes to measure how far and how fast they traveled and whether they ever found a new pack.

The record-setting males were part of a larger group that left Kafue in 2025. Four females set out with them; their number soon fell to three. One of those females covered 1,899 kilometers, about 1,180 miles, before she died, most likely in a wire snare. The researchers believe a second female was also snared, and the fate of the third is unknown. Only the three males kept going and eventually established a new home range.

An earlier group fared worse. Three sisters left South Luangwa National Park together in 2021 and traveled more than 2,300 kilometers over 11 months without ever finding a pack to join. One was killed by a snare. Her two sisters vanished, and the researchers suspect snares took them as well. Wire snares set by poachers for bushmeat are indiscriminate and are the single biggest threat to dispersing dogs the moment they leave well-protected land.

The collar tracks also mapped something conservationists had hoped existed: a functioning corridor. Dogs dispersing from South Luangwa moved along a protected route that connected them with North Luangwa, Luambe, Lukusuzi and Lower Zambezi National Parks. Because wild dogs can travel such distances between reserves, the authors argue, keeping those corridors intact matters as much as protecting the parks themselves. "Wild dogs' enduring capacity to move long distances through unfavorable landscapes provides an extraordinary opportunity to conserve a functional meta-population of an endangered large carnivore at the continental scale," they wrote.

The findings cut both ways. The species is capable of stitching Africa's fragmented reserves back together on its own, if the routes between them are kept open and the snares are removed. As the data show, the journey is survivable for some, but the cost, measured in dead sisters along the road, is still far too high.