Wild dogs (which aren’t actually wild dogs, but never mind that for now) are a species that has become endangered without anyone raising an eyebrow. Until, that is, a globe-trotting adventurer named Greg Rasmussen began working with local villages to rebrand the dogs  and save them from extinction.

Image Nicholas D. Kristof Credit... Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

It’s a tale that offers some useful lessons for do-gooders around the world, in clever marketing and “branding,” and in giving local people a stake in conservation. For if it’s possible to rescue a despised species with a crummy name like “wild dogs,” any cause can have legs.

Mr. Rasmussen was born in Britain but grew up partly in Zimbabwe. He bounced around the world for years as a sailor, zookeeper and kennel owner, surviving a charging elephant, a venomous 12-foot black mamba, a possibly rabid mongoose and a coma from cerebral malaria.

Eventually, he ended up researching African wild dogs. He crashed his small plane in the African bush (he was found a day and a half later, half-dead, as he was being stalked by lions), and while learning to walk again he earned a doctorate in zoology, emerging as one of the world’s leading specialists on wild dogs.

Once the African wild dog was found by the hundreds of thousands across Africa, but today there are only a few thousand left, mostly in Zimbabwe, Botswana, Tanzania and South Africa.