MBWA MWITU: AFRICAN WILD DOG: That's Disgusting!: Conditioned Taste Aversion in African Wild Dogs

There is an ongoing battle between African wild dogs and farmers living in areas like Botswana, Africa. In one year, predominately African wild dogs and African lions killed 500 livestock animals causing $275,000 in damages. Organizations such as “The Wild Source” and “WildiZe” are working to decrease the amount of African predators killed by humans, who are protecting their livestock, through Conditioned Taste Aversion (CTA). CTA occurs when a predatory animal associates a taste (the conditioned stimulus) with sickness and nausea (the unconditioned stimulus) after consuming livestock, such as cattle. After an animal consumes toxins in her food, a gastrointestinal illness ensues, causing her to find future tastes and scents of cattle undesirable. This evolved form of learning increases the chance of the organism’s survival.

Conditioned taste aversion studies using thiabendazole are being conducted at the California Wolf Center and one such study in 2009 successfully taught captive Mexican wolves to cease eating ground mutton. “The Wild Source,” a commercially based organization with research supporting the conservation of African animal species, is also conducting conditioned taste aversion studies in the “Africa Predator Project.” Modeling studies conducted on predators in the United States, such as the Mexican wolf ones, the “Africa Predator Project” aims to use conditioned taste aversion techniques to deter captive lion and wild dogs from pursuing livestock. The ultimate goal is to condition wild, roaming animals to avoid the taste of different livestock animals in order to protect their dwindling numbers from threatened farmers. “Wildize” is also conducting a conditioned taste aversion study on 20 captive lions, suspecting that the results from these efforts will help the movement of using CTA to prevent conflict between farmers and predatory wildlife. In 1997, Woodroffe and Ginsberg documented that 27 percent of adult wild dogs were killed by bullet or poison in five areas of Africa: Kruger National Park, Northern Botswana, Hwange National Park, Selous Game Reserve, and Zambia. Hopefully the application of CTA studies with African wild dogs can be used in the near future to decrease the detrimental influence human predation has on the already small numbers of this endangered species.