African wild dogs are great travellers; for the nine months of the year that they are not denning with pups, they range over hundreds or thousands of square kilometres, covering up to 50 kilometres in a day. Sadly, the distances they cover across their huge home ranges take them outside the safety of protected wildlife areas and into human-dominated landscapes where they face the risk of lethal conflict with livestock farmers, snaring, and being killed on roads. That is why we are developing artificial territorial boundary markers,and why we need to understand how wild dogs organise their use of space.

A wild dog pack’s movements have no pattern that humans can discern,but they do not just wander randomly about; they have home ranges, and neighbouring packs usually stay out of one another’s core areas. How they know where their home range boundaries are and which areas are occupied has been a puzzle for along time; scent marking has always been a strong candidate for inter-pack communication, but nobody had been able to explain how such wide-ranging animals could even find one another’s scent, let alone react to it.

Then, in 2015 Botswana Predator Conservation Trust field researcher Megan Claase saw a wild dog pack scent marking where a group of dispersing females had marked about a month earlier. Out of curiosity, we monitored the site with camera traps, and as videos of repeated visits and scent marking by wild dog packs accumulated, it become clear that Megan had discovered something completely new;a shared, multi-pack, scent marking latrine.