The Wild Bunch – India’s wild dogs

2000 A BBC Wildlife on One

Set in Kanha National Park, in the heart of India’s Kipling country, this film chases some of the writer’s most notorious characters – the “red dogs”. Villains they may have been in “Jungle Book” but today we know more about these social animals. About the size of a collie dog, dholes, to give them their proper name, have an intimate social life, which has never been revealed before.

These group-living dogs hunt in large packs, enabling them to compete with the more powerful but solitary tiger. Even Shere Khan, the tiger, Kipling wrote “will surrender a new kill to the dhole”. This film looks at how the dogs’ team-work enables them to compete with their rival hunters, the tiger and the jackal, for survival.