TANZANIA (eTN) – Attractive for their hunting skills, the African wild dogs are one of the most beautiful, yet endangered carnivore species in Tanzania, and Africa facing a great risk to disappear.
Efforts to conserve this species of wild, hunting dogs had brought new hopes in Tanzania when packs comprised of over a dozen dogs each were released to the Serengeti National Park plains after a successful project to conserve this species proved a great success to save their lives from local communities which hunted them to protect their livestock.
A pack of 17 wild dogs was recently released to the Serengeti plains from the Serengeti Wild Dog Conservation Project, a special sanctuary established to collect and breed the wild dogs as a nursery for translocation in the Serengeti.
The dogs were released to the park a few days ago to start their new, natural life inside the wider plains of the Serengeti and where tourists from all corners of the world will get a chance to observe the wild dogs’ hunting skills, an attractive natural phenomenon.
Tanzanian Minister for Natural Resources and Tourism, Prof. Jumanne Maghembe opened the gates for the wild dogs to leave their human-made sanctuary and go live in their natural habitat within the Serengeti National Park.
“The dogs were going into extinct [status as] … the species of African wild dogs were facing extinction all over the world,” he said.
Director General of Tanzania National Parks, Mr. Allan Kijazi, said the latest wild dog pack traveled through the Maasai Mara all the way to Tsavo, all in Kenya, before crossing back to Tanzania.
The Serengeti is undoubtedly the best-known wildlife sanctuary in the world, unequaled for its natural beauty and scientific value. With more than two million wildebeest, half a million Thomson gazelle, and a quarter a million zebra, it has the greatest concentration of wildlife in Africa.
The wildebeest and zebra form the star cast of a spectacular and unique show on Earth – the Serengeti migration. Serengeti plains cover an area of over 14,763 kilometers, and the migration itself travels 800 kilometers on the path from Tanzania to the Maasai Mara Reserve in Kenya.
Big herds of trekking wildebeest zing through the Serengeti at breakneck speed, they pour over the Tanzanian border across the Mara River in the Maasai Mara Game Reserve in Kenya, where they settle and graze until the end of October.
Serengeti is as big as Northern Ireland, and it covers a wide ecosystem which covers the Ngorongoro Conservation Area, Maswa Game Reserve, and the Maasai Mara Game reserve in Kenya.
Stretching from the shore of Lake Victoria with the Great Rift Valley to the northeast, the Serengeti ecosystem offers the most complex and least disturbed ecosystem on Earth.
A unique combination of diverse habitats enables this park to support more than 30 species of large herbivores and nearly 500 species of birds.
Big herds of zebra and gazelle wander the plains in abundance, while the rare black rhino can be spotted, making a tourist to reflect back on the wonders of nature in which black rhinos first graced the planet some 64 million years ago.
Today, the black rhinos are disappearing from the Tanzanian wildlife parks through the misery of corrupt individuals who have hunted these African mammals just for the sake of its horn.
The Serengeti is among the most researched wildlife park in Africa, where rhinos have been relocated from South Africa in efforts to protect the few remaining ones on the African continent.
The park’s unique ecosystem has inspired writers from Ernest Hemingway to Peter Mattheissen, and filmmakers like Hugo von Lawick and Alan Root, as well as numerous photographers and scientists.
Professor Bernhard Grzimek, a prominent German zoologist, made a classic film and wrote a book, all with titles “Serengeti Shall Not Die.”
Like the biblical theory of the flood of Noah’s days, Serengeti looks like a place where Noah’s ark landed and let free the animals that to this day live there.
